Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2020 10:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language
Please be cautious: **External Email**
Moses:
Your position needs considerable revision along the lines offered by Ken and Biko.
But more significantly, the greatest disaster may be the untapped knowledge and theories in all indigenous languages. Yoruba, for instance, is so rich not only on ontologies but also on epistemologies. The tragedy is that they are untapped.
I was taken aback the first time I read Foucault—I kept wondering what he was talking about that I did not already know.
Four of us interviewed Kelani last Sunday. The first question that Ken asked him was about power. The ontology of his answer, based on Yoruba, was not far different from Gramsci's Prison Notebook.
Thus, the Nsukka people have Igbo, which Westerners don't have. They need to milk it. When I collaborated to create the Ogbu Kalu Center, in honor of one of my best friends in the world who died young, I began to plead to convert the extensive ideas in Igboness into large-scale theories. Afigbo, the preeminent historian—in my opinion the country's best historian of his era—was so well grounded that he was able to use the rich resources of the Igbo to complicate the archives.
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, October 30, 2020 at 9:26 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language
Oga,
Yes, the default stock response of some of our people to linguistic critique and to efforts to improve language proficiency in English is "grammar no be our language," "colonial mentality," and "grammar is no be intelligence" etc. They wear their poor writing skills as a badge of Afrocentric honor. There are many variations of this common, hackneyed Nigerian justification of bad writing and poor linguistic skills. Of course, it's all a defensive mechanism to avoid having to do the hard work of improving their writing.
Well, Ngugi is exhibit A of the duplicity and impracticality of the "write and theorize in your mother tongue" canard. It doesn't work. He returned to English after his initial experiment writing in Gikuyu.
The insistence on "mother tongue" intellection and the hostility to English (or French) mastery undermines our effort to break through and to have our theories and modes of thought understood, valued, and engaged in the Euro-American academy.
We cannot be complaining about being shut out and not being taken seriously and then say English (or French) mastery is not an important objective or is a colonial hangover or a surrender to linguistic imperialism. Why give the hostile Western interlocutor an excuse to ignore your perspectives by writing badly?
One Facebook respondent says we can theorize in our mother tongue. Of course we can, but we cannot then turn around and complain that Western scholars are not according our theories and ideas the seriousness they deserve or that they're not engaging these ideas. We can't have it both ways.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 5:35 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Moses:
Do they really say that "so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important?"
Or
That we should use our mother tongues at the primary level, at the very list, and promote African languages? Ngugi recently won the prize in Swahili, and his recent novel is written in English.
Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important.
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, October 30, 2020 at 5:28 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language
Earlier today, I had a Zoom session with the Music Study Group of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Nigeria. Thanks to
, the HOD of Music at UNN, for organizing it.
One of the questions put to me during the session is how the marginalized theoretical and scholarly perspectives of Nigeria/Africa can receive serious reception and respect in a global (read Western-dominated) academic culture that devalues Global South thinkers and thinking by default and values Euro-American ones also by default.
There are several strategies, some of which I shared with the group, but one aspect of the answer that I didn't get to cover adequately is that of language. In my experience the cheapest, easiest excuse that the Western academy uses to exclude and disenfranchise African scholars and their perspectives is to say that their writing is poor—that they can't write.
There are of course all kinds of racist and othering underpinnings to this tactic, but sometimes the excuse is based on an actually existing writing deficit. And I would argue, following our late friend, Pius Adesanmi, that to be taken seriously and be reckoned with in the Western academy, we have to write back to Western theorists as insurgents bypassing and crashing the gates and gatekeepers but we have to do so in a language that is intelligible to the gatekeepers, in their own academic lexicon. That way, you take that go-to alibi off the table and compel them to examine and engage with your work on its merit.
You can have, as Africa-based scholars often do, radical, iconoclastic, novel, and revisionist perspectives, theories, and approaches, but if you do not deprive your Western interlocutors of the poor writing excuse, they'll always use it to exclude you.
That is why I emphasize linguistic mastery and writing excellence, and lament the decline of writing in Nigerian universities. If the writing is bad no one is going to grasp or have the patience to comprehend the radically new theory and argument you're advancing. And this contention applies to all disciplines, including the hard sciences.
Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important. Whether we like it or not, English is the scholarly Lingua Franca of the world we live in and your access to global scholarly conversations and intellectual capital is directly proportional to your written and oral fluency in it. Ask the South Asian scholars of the subaltern collective how they broke through and forced their theories on the Western academy after going through a similar complaining phase as us.
More importantly, if we're asking for a hearing at the theoretical table, it is not compromise or self-betrayal to adopt the prevailing paradigmatic linguistic medium. After all, we're the ones seeking to alter the global epistemological dynamic, force a reckoning with African and Africa-derived theories, and teach Western scholars our ways of knowing and seeing the world.
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