Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare Culpable

My Eze:

 

Please no blood birth, as you mentioned to close this elegant piece of yours. The continent has seen enough wars, and arguments about older beliefs in relation to the modern academy should not bring about the specter of violence. Both the professor and Moses, in the outcome, are looking for progress!

 

There is nothing that you and I can do to prevent people from holding their beliefs—what we can do is to let them conform to academic practices. And I think we should also understand that African spaces will create semi-autonomous understanding of what this academy is about.

 

Years ago at the ASA, I prostrated to Prof. Bolanle Awe and some people said I should not do this in an academic forum. No, I said, if I see her anywhere in the world, I won't bow my head, I will prostrate fully. Peculiarities like this cannot just be eliminated because they don't fall into our understanding of the academy.

 

To repeat, those beliefs do not impact my own work, so that my contributions are not misread.

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   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chielozona Eze <chieloz@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 11:20 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare Culpable

 

It is interesting that the champions of "African science" would rely on metaphors from Western science to demonstrate the validity of African witchcraft. Dutch anthropologist Peter Geschiere writes about a Cameroonian witch who told him about her skill in piloting planes for up to thirty years, and that white people have been attempting to take the plane from them (Africans). Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise relies on the obvious example of the function of an electronic "remote control" system to prove his conjectures about a witch in the United Kingdom breaking the leg of a person in South Africa.

Why you would rely on the evidence of what everyone can understand to prove what only you (or your imaginary people) believe to know is beyond me. It is, indeed, easy to locate the failure (doom) of Nigeria's academia and the complicity of her academics in this contradiction, in the inability to ask simple questions and to follow the lead. Our thinking seems to operate on a simplistic combination of a premise and a conclusion.

And while we are at it, we should note that witchcraft and occultism are not exclusive to Africa. In 1597, King James VI King of Scotland (later King James I of England) published a book on witchcraft called Daemonologie. When he became the king of England in 1603 he initiated a systematic sweeping campaign to rid England of witches, thus creating one of the many instances of massive human rights abuses in European history. The Catholic Church had been knee-deep in that belief (if not practice). In 1487 Heinrich Kramer published a book Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). That book created a background for the Inquisition.

But then, through a deft combination of critical thinking and scientific proofs, Europeans were able to make a sharp distinction between knowledge and belief, between things that should inform public policies and things that ought to be restricted to the private domain. I think the same could be said of the Japanese and the Chinese who supposedly worship their ancestors.

Perhaps, Africa will have to experience its own bloodbath comparable to the European Inquisition and witch-hunt before we, African intellectuals, begin to ask questions aimed at lifting our collective life and enhancing human flourishing.

 

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 Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze

www.Chielozona.com

My latest book: Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa.

 

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 10:05 AM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

EDITED

 

Witchcraft is a recognized religion in the West, one of the fastest growing perhaps.

 

There is a lot of overlap between modern Western witchcraft and Yoruba Iyami aje beliefs.

 

Occultism is big in the West.

 

A significant no of the claims made for witches in Africa are also made for occultists in the West.

 

Do Western scholars, including those who are openly witches and occultists, even when writing about about their belief systems in academic contexts, uncritically present those belief systems as objectively factual and as equivalent to scientific technology, as Nwolise seems to be doing?

 

Relevant examples are Neville Drury, who crowned a lifetime as magical practitioner and writer on magic with his published PhD thesis   Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic ( Oxford UP, 2011).

 

In African Studies, a superb example of critical presentation of religious subjectivity in scholarship is John McCall's "Making Peace with Agwu",  his account of his initiation into Igbo dibia,   in which he is careful to delineate the fact that he is describing a subjective experience, not objective fact, as he carefully negotiates relationships between the mode of knowing offered by the initiation and the epistemic methods he has been trained in as an anthropologist.

 

A classic effort to develop an understanding of religion in terms of various accounts of religious experience is Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy, demonstrating a rigorous balance between description and analysis.

 

At no point in these texts is bald statement of belief without critical contextualization ever presented.

 

Subjectivity has a place in critical scholarship, even the description of the subjectivity of the scholar, but it needs to be a critical,  reflexive subjectivity, not an uncritical one. 

 

That is an ideal, but the closer the scholar is to that ideal, the closer they are to the essence of scholarship in the Western tradition as an effort to understand reality rather than be mastered by reality, including the reality of one's  own subjectivity, an approach that empowers the human being in terms of balance between aspects of consciousness, the subjective and the critical, the intellectual and the emotional.

 

Nwolise needs to explain why he thinks the claims he makes are facts. Are they realities that are part of existence outside one's belief in them? To what degree are these claims about the nature of reality valid beyond their effects, if any beyond the psychological, on those who believe in them? 

What makes him convinced that witches can see across distances without conventional technology, can harm people at a distance and that spirits rove about in space"?

 

The quality of analysis or critical contextualization of one's beliefs represents the quality of one's scholarship. 

 

 

toyin

 

On Mon, 6 May 2019 at 15:44, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Witchcraft is a recognized religion in the West, one of the fastest growing perhaps.

 

There is a lot of overlap between modern Western witchcraft and Yoruba Iyami aje beliefs.

 

Occultism is big in the West.

 

A significant no of the claims made for witches in Africa are also made for occultists in the West.

 

Do Western scholars, including those who are openly witches and occultists, even when writing about about their belief systems in academic contexts, uncritically present those belief systems as factual and as equivalent to scientific technology, as Nwolise seems to be doing?

 

Relevant examples are Neville Drury, who crowned a lifetime as magical practitioner and writer on magic with his published PhD thesis   Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic ( Oxford UP, 2011).

 

In African Studies, a superb example of critical presentation of religious subjectivity in scholarship is John McCall's "Making Peace with Agwu",  his account of his initiation into Igbo dibia,   in which he is careful to delineate the fact that he is describing a subjective experience, not objective fact, as he carefully negotiates relationships between the mode of knowing offered by the initiation and the epistemic methods he has been trained in as an anthropologist.

 

A classic effort to develop an understanding of religion in terms of various accounts of religious experience is Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy, demonstrating a rigorous balance between description and analysis.

 

At no point in these texts is bald statement of belief without critical contextualization ever presented.

 

Subjectivity has a place in critical scholarship, even the description of the subjectivity of the scholar, but it needs to be a critical,  reflexive subjectivity, not an uncritical one. 

 

That is an ideal, but the closer the scholar is to that ideal, the closer they are to the essence of scholarship in the Western tradition as an effort to understand reality rather than be mastered by reality, including the reality of one's  own subjectivity, an approach that empowers the human being in terms of balance between aspects of consciousness, the subjective and the critical, the intellectual and the emotional.

 

Nwolise needs to explain why he thinks the claims he makes are facts. Are they realities that are part of existence outside one's belief in them? To what degree are these claims about the nature of reality valid beyond their effects, if any beyond the psychological, on those who believe in them? 

What makes him convinced that witches can see across distances without conventional technology, can harm people at a distance and that spirits rove about in space"?

 

The quality of analysis or critical contextualization of one's beliefs represents the quality of one's scholarship. 

 

 

toyin. 

 

 

 

 

 

On Mon, 6 May 2019 at 14:40, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:

My concern is not so much about Prof Nwolise but with the logic of my good friend Prof. Ochonu.How can the utterance of one professsor spell doom for the entire academic arena?

I think Nwolise made the mistake of not substituting the word "angel " for witches and spirits.I don't think he would have escaped the scrutiny of Moses but there are a lot of folks in this forum who would have given him a free pass. In any case, I am disappointed that Nwolise's witches did not turn water into wine.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

---

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2019 8:17:30 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare Culpable

 

I really can't DISAGREE more with your defence of OBC here!

 

He is simply playing to the gallery of the priests coining it in on the insecurities of Nigerians and trying to fashion how the academia can profit from the gravy train.

 

He is taking too seriously banter from the likes of TF that academics are in the wrong profession because they are not turning into millionaires(unlike the priesthood) for all the efforts they put into their lives and work.

 

 

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Date: 06/05/2019 12:30 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare  Culpable

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

I also need to add that Prof. Nwolise must have taken the Comaroff's advice on anthropological research. In "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction," they advised that the encounters between the global (i.e. the cultural manifestations of neoliberalism) and the local (i.e. the enchantments of witchcraft and pentecostalism) should challenge us "to do ethnography on an 'awkward' scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there." 

 

This is good advice that will not scream doom.

 

Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan

+23480-3928-8429

 

 

On Monday, May 6, 2019, 1:04:39 AM GMT+1, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

 

 

Question:

 

Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:

"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."

 

Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?

 

And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor".  The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.

 

There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.

 

The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.

 

In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

 

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

 

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

 

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

 

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

 

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

 

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