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: Tuesday, January 3, 2023 8:08 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Cc: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naija today and yesterday, with respect to Respect for Elders (Yoruba culture)
EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click any links or open any attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.
Cornelius, the Wise- you usuallyget me right, but not this time.I did not say that Falolawas equal to Marx.In fact Falola and Marx are deadopposites. Marx was in no wayspell bound by the Judaeo-Christian religious system. Heconsidered that it was allpropaganda, an opiate forthe weak, even though hehimself was of Jewish heritage.Falola, however, obviouslyholds on to the script andquotes Peter, Paul, Matthewand counterparts with abandon-a tendency that would havebeen viewed with utter disdainby Marx. Marx was a producerof theories and explanationsof socio - economicreality. Falola is generally aconsumer of empiricistperceptions of the world-and is more Braudel thanMarx - but what Falola andMarx have in common isgargantuan ambition andscale. So, too Braudel,whose work I basically detest -for its overly empiricist/Eurocentric undertones, eventhough I admire the scopeof his project.
While at ABU I sat downover many months, and read pageby page, the fifty three volumesof Marx that Progress Publishersbrought out at that time.They arethe best books that I have everread. No vindictive, contradictory,violent bouts of intimidationand scare tactics would be foundin these non- Biblical tomes.Now if I were to read all of thebooks of Falola theywould be probably thrice as muchin volume.So my focus was on thecolossal scale of the project.An inordinate dedication tothe project at hand, and hard coredetermination to finish thejob, no matter what, bindtogether the three.
The next stage is to read closelythe collected works and definethem in historiographical,and scholarly terms of originality.That is a mighty task-given the scale of Falola's work,but can be done in the traditionof Bangura's "Falolaism"-forsomeone interested in such amonumental project.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
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
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 2, 2023 6:49 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naija today and yesterday, with respect to Respect for Elders (Yoruba culture)EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click any links or open any attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
Just kidding.
It's a very wintry Stockholm evening indeed, it was not a White Christmas in honour of Wole Soyinka's first white hairs either, nor did it snow or rain cats and dogs on New Year's Eve to usher in 2023 with some of the old "Same procedure as last year" - Dinner For One / The 90th Birthday which they show on Swedish TV, every New Year's Eve. Outside our windows, it was continuous staccato fireworks
"Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead…"
Thus begins T.S. Eliot's Gerontion
There's worse.
Unprintable.
You get a white Aryan supremacist as your examiner, beware…
Yesterday afternoon, after chatting with Baba Kadiri and wishing him A Prosperous New Year, just before 3 pm Stockholm time I told my Better Half to make sure that she didn't disturb me for the next couple of hours. What's up ? she asked me, she had just read Ojogbon's meditation on Nothingness - nothing to do with the Buddhist term "Nothingness" or the void - or the supreme ego ( "ye are gods" ) and as for yours truly, as an emerging, unambitious, non-achiever I did what I do constantly: I took umbrage/ refuge/cover under Solomon's final judgement that "All is vanity", even as I told her that it was time for some praise-singing of Ojogbon. She remonstrated, "But he has said - specifically - that he doesn't want any of that ". It was then that I reassured her that praise-singing is specifically a very intrinsic part of Yoruba culture and that this Event Today was actually in keeping with a time-honoured, age-old, sacred tradition of honouring and celebrating someone like Ojogbon Falola and his awe-inspiring achievements. She told me that she was sure that Ojogbon would relish the praise singing and that praise singing is intrinsic to all great African cultures.
"All great African cultures".
What more could anyone say?
It being the 1st day of 2023, Sabr got the better of me and anyway I was in no mood to argue with her.
I thank God that everything went perfectly according to plan.
The setting: Sitting robustly and confidently on his pedestal, our very human and humane Ojogbon was put in a very contemporary historical context by our very philosophical Michael Vickers. Our Ojogbon deserves at least this one song, from all of us and from Her Majesty: All the Things You Are
Today, the 2nd day of 2023, after hearing about Bitter Old Negro Obasanjo's latest, to some people's chagrin that Obasanjo has endorsed Peter Obi - and that was after we all saw him singing Ojogbon Falola's praises in a personal letter read to the Ojogbon - at the event, check it out: Olusegun Obasanjo praises Professor Toyin Falola - leaving the likes of me with mixed feelings, a bitter taste in my mouth and with a sickening stench still corrupting the air outside my nostrils, I'm left wondering, hopefully not alone in asking, can this Octogenarian Elder Obasanjo known as Pastor Obasanjo be trusted? Can he ever be taken seriously? Is his praise-singing worth anything? Just a couple of years ago, wasn't he the man who said, "God will never forgive me if I support Atiku for the presidency"? And what did the turncoat Chameleon do a few minutes later? He started singing Atiku's praises! Atiku, his former vice-president who he knew so well. Of course, God did not forgive him and that is another reason why his dear soulmate Atiku - two of a kind, birds of the same feather, of course, lost to Brother Buhari. The same Obasanjo who was implicated in the sad demise of the righteous and Honourable Murtala Muhammed. The very same Obasanjo who to this day is being accused of having betrayed Chief MKO Abiola, now raises his black hand from behind, to stab his fellow Yoruba Elder, Bola Ahmed Tinubu who thank God has responded fittingly to the pig farmer's latest diatribe. By the way, I'm an Egba man too, by way of Abeokuta.
I'd just like to add that I'm impressed, maybe inordinately so, by Peter Obi's calm response to spoiler Brer Obasanjo's spiel.
"The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young" (To da people: When You Gonna Wake Up?)
Once upon a time, Wole Soyinka too did not mince his words to Obasanjo. He told him: Just Go!
Listen up: This album Pay the Piper fully covers the Naija situation just before the oncoming 25th February 2023 Presidential election
I must confess that I'm in a pretty iconoclastic mood, such that if some mongrelized bariba pussycat were to cross my path just now, he or she would only have himself or herself to blame for not being anything like a "tiger", like the one Shakespeare talked about, the one that his English professor at Lafayette never taught him has " no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger "
Me? I'm thinking of the oldies, the masters and mistresses of yore, all those who have gone before.
Comparatively speaking, with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, what can even mere vermin not do on an unsullied, solid clean white page or like Bird's Word when "Everything was silent" like a clean white sheet of nothing asking to be filled by Romantic poetry mostly composed of some of the sweet nothings characteristic of Italian Petrarchan Sonnets or later imitators such as Sir Philip Sidney ( "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies") and later, but not too much later, Shakespeare?
Yesterday, when Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali, in a flight of fancy or it could have been another fit of fantasy waxing hyperbolic - a characteristic poetic disposition of the traditional Yoruba praise-singer such as yours truly King Sunny Ade, albeit in this instance it was female muse GE not Kanye West YE elevating Ojogbon Falola to the ranks of Marx and with a mouth sweeter than honey, of course she couldn't help but raise the Ojogbon above Shakespeare - she said that the bard's total output could all be squeezed into any slender volume put out by Ojogbon TF - at which point I was of course thinking about the latter - the aforementioned - WS ( William Shakespeare ) the not-so-learned, who knew "small Latin, and less Greek" and not the 20th century WS ( Wole Soyinka, D.Litt ) who hopefully will rise to the challenge of dusting up translating King David and his son Solomon's wisdom poetries into elegant Yoruba - at least to the satisfaction of Baba Kadiri who would then have Hebrew Scriptures being conveyed to him in his own eloquent mother tongue, directly through the agency of human (as opposed to inhuman) translation….
I was thinking fondly of the former ( he who was never awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, not even posthumously), with regard to his tremendous output of that which is highly regarded as Shakespearean Sonnets - and I was thinking about some of them the way that some of the pious rabbis think of Tehillim and what the carnal-minded, misunderstanding formerly polygamic Mormons and some of the morons regard as a highly erotic Shir Hashirim, and I suppose that it's the same way that they approach Sufi poetry about the Beloved.
I haven't read this over.
But who am I, who be me to complain?
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