Biko:
Identities are constructed!
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 10:51 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: AReflection and Response
Olayinka,
I agree with you. People are no longer the people they used to be even a few years later. Philosophers say that we never step into the same river Niger twice because the river is not the same and the people are not the same again.
However, you must agree with my intervention in historiography where the assertion that white men invented our identities is taken for granted by historians because those making the assertion are intellectual giants. As a non-historian, I am not persuaded by the claim that the Igbo in Onicha were not Igbo because they identified with the Obi of Onicha, that Hausa people in Kano were not Hausa simply because they identified as Kanawa or that the Yoruba in Ibadan were not Yoruba because they identified with the Oyo kingdom or even that Africans were not Africans until Scipio Africanus named them after himself. Na lie o. No be so?
Biko
On Tuesday, 29 June 2021, 03:52:07 GMT-4, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Oga Biko:
People never remained the same through the ages. They mirrored the changes in the political organisations even if their names remain the same.
The different cultures and people that specific people encounter over the ages inflect their cultures and outlook.
The Yorùbá during the reign of Aláàfin Sàngó were not the same as the Yoruba today no matter the amount of continuities; there were also ontological discontinuities. This is why some historians argue you can never capture the past as it really was in any historical narrative.
OAA
Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 28/06/2021 17:16 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: AReflection and Response
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Oga Toyin, history is the turf of you and Moses. I am only a sociologist eavesdropping here. I know that all available evidence point to the African origin of humanity. Catherine Acholonu wrote a trilogy on the ancestors of Adam. If it was written by a white man, many Africans will be lapping it up as biblical truth.
I agree with you that political organizations may change but the people remain the same. The Igbo have always been Igbo, the Hausa Hausa, and the Yoruba Yoruba. Dike, Usman, and Mamdani were decentered by Eurocentric authors into asserting the European Invention of Africa thesis of Mudimbe. Africans invented humanity, including Europeans and everyone else.
That was the argument of Diop in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. He debunked the mythology of polygenesis according to which the Europeans believed that they descended from angels or from a different kind of monkey. Diop defended the thesis of monogenesis with a common African ancestor and Acholonu makes a similar argument with evidence from linguistics, human language having originated in Africa according to Philology and to Chomsky. Science has since proven the African origin incontrovertibly right.
As for the Adaam (I have failed, in Igbo) and Eve (light) story of creation, we all know that Africans have their own stories too, including that of Obatala (he has entered, in Igbo - the Igbo are the ancestors of the Obatala, according to Ifa, they are related) and that of my village where we believe that we are the children of Mr and Mrs Chi na Eke. Religion is a free country where you believe what you choose and choose what you believe so long as you are not oppressing the children of God and your hand is clean.
Prime Minister Disraeli was once asked if he agreed with Darwin that we descended from apes. He answered that when it comes to a choice between angels and monkeys as our ancestors, he and his family will stick with the angels and Mr Darwin was welcome to go with the apes. Ha ha ha.
Biko
On Monday, 28 June 2021, 10:55:47 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Biko:
There is no such a thing as "The Igbo have always been Igbo even before Adam and Eve!" You cannot eat your cake and have it. If you accept the Biblical origin mythology, there were no people before then. The Igbo arrived after Adam and Eve!
There have always been people, but Yoruba, Idoma, Igbo, as identities, have always been plastic.
TF
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, June 28, 2021 at 7:54 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Asymmetrical Relationships: A Reflection and Response
The Igbo have always been Igbo even before Adam and Eve were created, according to Catherine Acholonu. The idea that Igbo identity was invented by the white man is a form of colonial mentality. The Igbo have been Igbo long before there was anyone known as a European. Dike, in his doctoral dissertation, made the mistake of confusing geopolitical organization with linguistic identity that is based on a common language just liker the Greeks who identified as Athenians or Spartans for political purposes but still identified as Greek city states. Usman made the same mistake in his doctoral dissertation by thinking that Kanawa identity was mutually exclusive from Hausa identity even though ther Hausa speakers knoew that the city states belonged to their brothers and sisters. Mamdani swallowed the confederal identity-less whopper by suggesting that it was colonial law that defined the Igbo as Igbo in order to rule over them. Na lie. Dewspite the parapo wars, the Yoruba always identified as the children of Oduduwa long before political regionalism.
Asaba Igbo and Onicha Igbo still refer to the core Igbo as nwa onye Igbo or child of the Igbo as if they are not Igbo too. That denialism is more recent and may have been shaped by the experience of the recent genocide against the Igbo that forced many Igbo in the peripheries to deny being Igbo in order to escape the peculiar history of Igbophobia. The history of denialism may also be deeper given that the enslavers believed that the Igbo did not make good slaves, which may have forced many to pass as other African nationalities.
Brexit shows that English people still do not fully accept being Europeans but they have always been Europeans, in my humble opinion.
Biko
On Sunday, 27 June 2021, 15:22:01 GMT-4, Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdullah@gmail.com> wrote:
When did Igbo emerge as an identity that defines all who call themselves Igbo? Was there an Igbo identity before 1800? The pre-capitalists socio-economic formations in that part of Nigeria was predominantly communal the Agbor Kimgdom and Onitsha were the exceptions.
Where and when did this Igbo Mbuntu emerge? Is this Mbuntu--crass romanticisation of communal Africa--not a distortion of history?
On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 at 3:28 PM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Aristotle believed that the only true friendship is between people who are unequal because equal friends are more likely to be rivals. The Igbo disagree and maintain that all heads are equal and so if you have more money than your friends, the right thing is to lift them up by helping them to establish their own businesses, teach them your craft, or to pay school fees for their children or even build houses for them. Nyerere said that this is why Africans (and the entire pre-capitalist world for that matter) could go on for millennia without producing many millionaires but also without producing many homeless people. Wealth is to be shared and not to be hoarded because no one takes anything to the land of the ancestors. We teachers practice this by sharing our knowledge with all and making friends without assuming that everyone must be of the same academic rank in order to be friends. Sociologists postulate that, according to the mating gradient, men tend to date down and women date up in age, wealth, education and even height. Friendship is not asymmetrical, it is reciprocal.
Biko
On Sunday, 27 June 2021, 09:17:09 GMT-4, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Asymmetrical friendships and relationships are very difficult to maintain because they are fraught with misunderstandings and misconceptions.
By asymmetrical relationships I mean relationships in which one party has clear socioeconomic superiority over the other. Such relationships could be either vertical or horizontal.
Both parties in an asymmetrical relationship are often guilty of acting on assumptions, stereotypes, and fears, which are not always unfounded but are sometimes not derived from the conduct of the party under scrutiny.
The less successful person in the relationship suspects that the richer, more successful party will snob, shun, and look down on them, so they walk on egg shells and sometimes avoid getting too close to their more successful friend. They fear being treated shabbily, being humiliated.
They assume that money and success make people prideful, conceited, and spiteful (which is often but not always true), and they don't want to be victims of that attitude, so they proceed with caution and hesitation in the relationship.
Some of them even avoid their more successful friends, believing that the friend would assume that they're getting close in order to ask for assistance. Treasuring their dignity, they suspend the friendship so they don't have to risk humiliation and rudeness.
For the more successful friend, the assumption/anxiety is simple: "will this friend look past my success and love me for me?" And will they think that I am a different person now that I am successful?
Another assumption is, "does this person still care for me as a friend or will our friendship now be mediated by how much material benefit they can derive from me?" Yet another one is, "how can I know if my success is not the reason why my less successful friends are relating with me?"
As a result of these mutual anxieties and assumptions, there is tension and awkwardness in asymmetrical relationships.
The friendship proceeds gingerly, but it is punctuated by moments of awkwardness, unease, and pretense, with each party concerned that the other party perceives them differently now and that this places a burden and a strain on the relationship.
I wonder what we might see if we think of this asymmetry as fundamentally about "power" not "success." The idea of success implies that a person has worked for something and achieved it. Sometimes that is not the root of the asymmetry, it can be random. Luck, being at the right place at the right time, having access to networks or privilege, race, gender etc..can, in the right context, set someone up for "success" and thus give them much more power over other people. Now, because power (money, influence, status etc) corrupts people it is logical that the person with less power should become cautious around the person with more power. Power is dangerous. Across time and space people with power have shown that they are inclined to abuse it. So being suspicious of someone with power is self preservation. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the person with more power to prove that they aren't going to use it to harm the other person(s). That is the price of having power, the onus is on the powerful to show that they are going to behave themselves. I also wonder if any relationship can sustain the idea that there is an "asymmetry" embedded in the relationship. I think as soon as that idea creeps in then the friendship is doomed. I am friends with people who are more privileged than I am but I don't think of myself as being in an asymmetrical relationship with anyone (unless, of course, they are my elders) because we are all bringing something valuable to the relationship, which is why we're are friends in the first place. Maybe the idea that there is an asymmetry is the cause of all these anxieties to begin with?
Marius, thanks for this perceptive take. I agree and your insight here introduces another important dimension to the matter. But I have two clarifications to make. One is that, while I totally agree that "privilege" is the more appropriate operative word here than "success" for the reasons you articulated, in the Nigerian (perhaps African) cultural context that my post is grounded in, the expansive, capacious notion of success already accounts for privilege, whether that privilege is the result of divine or structural favor, luck, chance, corruption, favoratism, power, abuse of access, inherited status or identities such as race, gender, class.
Certainly, in Nigeria, there are many vernacular philosophical and moral-economic articulations of this expansive idea of success that I will not bore you with, which depart from the narrower Western notion of success, your critique of which is spot on---and which certainly denies unearned privilege and luck, being rooted in the intersection of Western capitalism and white supremacy.
The second point is that I was referring to relationships in which the parties knew each other since they both were and had nothing (colloquially speaking--mostly relationships in which they grew up together. The dynamic of awkwardness and unease and tension is the result of this extensive prior familiarity and intimacy in the days of symmetrical and horizontal statuses and relations. This is precisely what introduces tension into the relationship because one party is suddenly more "privileged" or "successful" than the other and this disrupts or upends the balance of the relationship. Neither party knows how to proceed, how to reset the relationship to its previous balance, hence the awkwardness, assumptions, mutual suspicions, and caution. Asymmetrical relationships in which there is no such prior history of equality and equal interactions are not the same as the one I was postulating, although they may have their own tensions.
Finally, I cannot agree with you more that the main problematic is the very idea, construct, or perception of "asymmetry" in a relationship. My concern is however not about how that perception or construct came about or whether it is problematic--it definitely is--but rather about the perception being real and consequential on the part of BOTH parties in the relationship, and also about asymmetry being constructed and sustained by assumptions, anxieties, stereotypes, and unequal power and resources. If I am right that the perception of asymmetry, whatever its cultural or other origins, is real and shapes the conduct of both parties then we must analyze it as a point of departure in understanding such relationships of unequal resources, privilege, and power that began differently as equal, horizontal relationships. Thanks as usual for your rigorous engagement.
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