The current situation being what it is, apart from developing our indigenous mother tongues you would have thought that French being taught in Anglophone Africa would be to facilitate communications with Francophone Africa, not just to read Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Proust, Sand, Camus, Flaubert, Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire in the original.
And there is one Abdul Karim Bangura who speaks eighteen languages and is currently learning hieroglyphics
Some more of what we read (1958-1963) from the great literary canon of the British Literary Empire making some of us to start feeling like Little Lord Fauntleroy
Henry V - Shakespeare (the very first play we read and had to commit to memory, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more", making histrionic actors of us - like John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson and Sir Laurence Olivier-as he was in Othello. Back then, Henry V made little English warriors of us all.
As for me, I still regret that I did not enlist in the Military
The Lotos-eaters - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And on Friday afternoons there was "Club Activities" - the Literary and Debating Society , the School Choir, the Cricket and Athletics Club, the Chess Club, the Drama Club where everybody wanted to play the main role in whatever play we were going to perform at the annual Speech and Prize-Giving Day
Our school was essentially different from all the other secondary schools in the country in that religion was not a subject on the syllabus - so, just the other day when a Gambian Krio guy was flaunting a Biblical quote at me , "Render your hearts and not your garments" followed by an enigmatic smile (he must have thought that what he was saying was common knowledge and assumed that I was also an early product of the CMS Mission, the civilising mission also offering salvation of souls, but in fact I had to go and look up the reference to find out what he had been laughing about and beaming, so pleased with himself
So, the Holy Bible - at home, at church, and at school and I suppose the Holy Quran too, is where they got some of their/ our values from and in my opinion at that time, circa 1963, perhaps because of having read D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" - Joyce's " A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Chapter 13 of Ulysses - I started at Chapter 13; I found what I understood and knew of idyllic Creoledom and Creole Society - because I lived in the midst of it all, found it to be quite different from the worlds in which those characters moved as we turned the pages of those books, and about Creole Society being prudish - indeed Victorian , judgemental, and that in practice when it came to woman palaver for some of the eminent men it was a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand and not "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
I think that Ike Udogu has hit the nail squarely on the head but it's most mystifying that the word racism has still not entered the conversation and it has probably not entered the picture because we the Black people are not racists , or so we believe; "tribalists", a big yes, yes we are and yes we can, but who among us is ever going to say like Julius Malema did sometime ago, " Kill the Boer!" - the boa constrictor yes, but not The Boer. Certainly not. One time, I did not even finish the sentence that I had started .Up at his studio, our parliament hoping for approval began, "We the Black People", when mentor Harvey Cropper cut me off shouting ," Don't come here with your racism!"
The elites of course are and feel privileged. For all their feelings of nationalism, patriotism cultural chauvinism, Nefertiti, black is beautiful etc, Sir Milton Margai was married to an oyibo English woman, Senghor, twice married to women born in France, first Ginette Éboué and then Colette Hubert Senghor. Amor vincit omnia, Ouattara is married with Dominique Ouattara
Kwame Anthony Appiah has touched on this topic in several places, beginning with his "In My Father's House" ...
I'm afraid this will have to be piecemeal and the holiest day on the calendar is on the horizon. Lots of relevant literature on the scapegoat ,
Sometimes I feel that when we don't want to take enough responsibility for much of the mess we've been wading through since independence, Kofi Kissi Dompere's poignant citation of Dr Kwame Nkrumah right here, notwithstanding, I feel that we are proffering excuses such as colonialism and neo-colonialism as a scapegoat
Located on the westernmost edge of the Guinea Coast of Africa which was known as "The White Man's Grave" jihadist mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, rainy season swamps, sun burns from skin burning tropical temperatures etc, you could say that the climate not permitting , Sierra Leone was never a place for settler colonisation, unlike South Africa, what was then Rhodesia ( now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Kenya where the climate was more congenial for the Oyibo, but there was a substantial British presence in Sierra Leone in the years before Independence. I asked Pa Google, "How many Brits lived in Sierra Leone before independence?" but did not get a clear estimate; perhaps the Encyclopaedia Britannica could have done better, but I'd hazard a guess that it must have been over 5,000 at any given year between 1958-1961
1958, Form 1 at P.O.W the first book that we zapped through was Lorna Doone by R.D.Blackmore. On my own I read Cry, the Beloved Country, followed by Mongo Beti's Mission to Kala ; Camara Laye, Chinua Achebe, Graham Greene, and Robert Wellesley Cole's most popular Kossoh Town Boy ( 1960) came much much later after finishing all of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and everything else that I could lay hands on at the British Council Library which was situated right behind my grandfather's house, by Tower Hill; so you see what colonialism did to me: whilst my classmates were busy with biology, chemistry etc I was keeping company with the likes of Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, I think to the delight of some of our English teachers, Englishmen, Von Bradshaw, Chapman ( M.A. Cantab) Michael Brunson ( Lower Six) with whom we did "Murder in the Cathedral."
There was also Mr. Holden ( Brit) and Mrs Holden ( Anglo-Indian
At some point a law was passed that only English should be spoken on the school premises. I was the first to break the law, on the very day it was passed. The law was either scrapped a few days later or fell into desuetude
French : We did Le Roi des montagnes with Mr. White ( Canadian) and La Porte Étroite with A.W. Rogers , a Belgian who was also the principal of the School….
To be continued
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 22:34:56 UTC+2 cornelius...@gmail.com wrote:Re - "Maybe cornelius" etc ,
the old Kabbalistic formula ,
" And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil"
I'd just like to say, and entirely without guile, that in the realm of human affairs, much is possible. For example, after the Nakba, in the midst of the continuous decimation of Palestinians, this kind of heart-breaking, breaking news:
Saudi Arabia moving closer to "normalising" relations with Israel
Maybe, the normalisation will either put a stop to the decimation or will contribute to the normalisation of the systematic genocidal decimation.
My friend Shalom told me that at Stockholm University he was in a maths class with a fellow student who ( apparently Palestinian) on getting to know that his name was Shalom and that he was Jewish, got up to give this sordid example of subtraction to which he Shalom objected vehemently : "You have 10 Israeli settlers and you shoot 9 of them, how many remain?"
Gladly, for the colonial imperialists and missionaries, such was not the case in much of British and French Colonial Africa, give and take a few exceptions such as Bai Bureh vs the British in Sierra Leone (1898), The Algerian War of Independence (1954 -1962), the Mau-Mau in Kenya (1952 -1960)
In reminiscing briefly at the request of Don Harrow, I'd like to start off with the historical fact that Sierra Leone was the first British colony in Africa, and for the longest period, 150 years. When Sierra Leone attained Independence on 27th April, 1961, English remained the official language (my grandparents generation spoke Victorian English, quoted passages from the King James Version of the Bible - and there's hardly anything that a bloke like Kperogi could have " taught" any of them). Indeed, the Brits left behind them legacies such as institutions of Western Education, a functioning judiciary comprising learned judges , a Westminster model of parliamentary government, a civil service run mostly as a meritocracy, salaries paid on time, back then 2 Leones was = £1 Sterling (the current rate of exchange is £1 = 25, 760 Leones), there was an efficient and effective police constabulary ,it was very much a law and order society, and in the capital City and the rest of the Western Area, there was an uninterrupted flow of electricity and pipe-borne water supply - in my mind how I yearn for the spirit's return, and I cry, as time flies…
Another milestone, another first :
King Charles III addresses the French Senate -partly in French !
Colonialism produced the phenomenon known as Anglo-Sierra Leone and the distinct category known as Anglo-Sierra Leonean, with characteristics that would take several chapters to illustrate ( the Anglo-Sierra Leonean in action in various stressful situations (smile. I think that the closest equivalent that I can think of is various "been-to" Nigerians and Ghanaians that I have encountered (There's Soyinka's The Interpreters etc and Ayi Kwei Armah's Semi Autobiographical Fragments and Why Are We So Blest ? which testify to a certain type of alienation ,variously diagnosed by Franz Fanon
In 1958 when I started secondary school in Sierra Leone, at the Prince of Wales School, we took first Latin, and then French as a second language, but unlike our counterparts in Dakar in Senegal and Guinea Conakry, we did not begin - in the name of some Frenchy assimilation policy, learning by rote that "Our ancestors were Gauls"; nor did we begin where I had started in Merry England, with William the Conqueror and 1066 - along with classmates Sylvester Abimbola Young, Akintola Wyse (who later on became a historian) we started at 1485, and "The War of the Roses" - our first official taste of African history was in lower six, when we studied " The British Empire Under Queen Victoria" - which along with all the literature and philosophy that had already gone down, contributed more than slightly in altering our worldview.
From that point of view, I must say that Senegal for example had a few distinct advantages, not exactly in the person and persona of Léopold Sédar Senghor rapturously singing the praises of the Black Woman whilst busily married to a White one, although to his credit he did produce poems such as New York , as indeed, in similar spirit some of the David Diop and Birago Diop poems not to mention Grand Maître Aimé Césaire who must have impacted and is still impacting Senegal, Francophone Africa and the rest of the African Diaspora, everywhere, in a big way. In addition to with regard to Senegal in particular, the persons of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke and Cheikh Anta Diop impinging on our consciousness forever.
It's time to ask Ken what it was like for him to be teaching at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal…and in your other place of learning some other kinds of consciousness-raising in the output of e.g. Ferdinand Oyono
To be continued, but at this point, duty calls and garçon cornelius ( in Swedish, "springpojke") has to go and get some groceries, s'il vous plaît
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 11:53:42 UTC+2 Harrow, Kenneth wrote:Dear ike,If "assimilation" was more officially french than english policy, the reality was that there wasn't much difference; not much difference at all, in my opinion.I could rally my arguments to try to make my case; right now, this is an expression of my opinion.The french offered entries into french society for the elite who followed the route of education, as you can read in so many novels, or testimonies.So did the brits.They both took high school grads in their university systems and returned them to elite positions at home.The question of language, pretty identical, and the question of culture, of values, etc, pretty identical.Maybe cornelius, who lived through much of the period where these values were taught and expressed could comment on his youth and experiences.Or any of the other greybeards old enough to have experienced that side of colonialismKen
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From: 'Emmanuel Udogu' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 1:12:07 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [External] [SOCIAL NETWORK] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin FalolaBeautiful piece. I now understand why Nigeria once banned the teaching of history in Nigeria; it's too revealing.
While reflecting on the centrality of this essay and Nigeria, my question is: why is it that many Nigerian leaders love London so much? We witnessed this phenomenon during the last elections period. Indeed, President Buhari went to London for a week's medical checkup. These trips left me scratching my head, and wondering about these politicians' unpatriotic character.
Recall, if you will, that Britain, unlike France and Portugal, never practiced the policy of assimilation in Anglophone Africa. Yet, some of our political actors seem to love the UK more than Nigeria. Why?
Ike Udogu
Ike Udogu
--On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 8:18 PM Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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From: 'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 1:41:17 PM
To: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin FalolaIndeed a great piece.I hope I canget the permission to include itin a forthcoming issue ofAfrica Update.
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: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 6:33 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola--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.
powerfully written, deeply disturbing
--On Tue, 12 Sept 2023 at 11:01, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
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