Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 5:48:35 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone Africa
Great thanks Ken.
Will look into Ikeha's work which you reference so glowingly.
The quote is Wariboko's, as I indicated in giving his name and the books page.
The Hindu pleasure theory is not a scientific theory so I'm puzzled you are thinking in terms of it's being assessed using scientific criteria
On Wed, Sep 27, 2023, 6:08 PM Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
So much to mull over, toyin. Thanks so much for this series of reflections. A few reactions: in science, these days, one of the critical tests of any claim is that it must stand the test of oppositional claims, that it can be tested by negating its premises. Your leaning on various claims of pleasure might be put to those tests?I love the wariboko statement (or is it yours too?) about operating on the border or boundary. I was taken by deconstruction very early, and on the cover of my first book placed an image of the threshhold of a thatched hut used to illustrate the hut used by circumcised boys, in Laye's L'enfant noir; and i used the moebius strip to mark the space/border between the inside of the hut and the outside. Just as camara laye came to occupy the space between two worlds.It takes daring for you to evoke hindu texts, hegel, wariboko, william blake, etc. it is the same daring that marks cajetan ikeha's work, breaking the assumed boundaries between the human, vegetative, animal, spiritual universes. But our literature has had the daring: look at ben okri's early stories and then all those works centering on the obanji.How to change our epistemologies, especially in a world where the production of knowledge obeys laws of neoliberal capitalism, as moses rightly pointed out?? We just have to keep talking. So keep it up, toyin!Ken
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 11:48:26 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone AfricaA beautiful discussion.
Needs to be compiled and archived online.
This discussion, synthesizing diverse views expressed here, helps me clarify my orientations-
Theory as Cognitive Instrument and Cognitive Skill
Theory may be understood as approaches to understanding the nature of phenomena in their individual characteristics and their relationships with other phenomena at a level requiring a degree of abstraction from the immediately accessible understanding of those phenomena.
Theory could relate to understanding aspects of reality constructed by nature or constructed by human beings or the convergence of both.
Theories are tools to be studied, critiqued, adapted and employed at the informed discretion of the user, working with those tools in terms of a dialogical relationship with their creative and negative possibilities, their strengths and limitations.
A theory is relevant only to the degree that it enables expanded insight, and such expansion could differ for various people at various degrees of significance beyond the sciences, into the more subjective zones of the social sciences and humanities.
Theory exploration, of existing theories, theory construction, of new theories, is a skill that should be cultivated and used as necessary.
Theory construction is a skill for exploring the intrinsic and extrinsic character of aspects of reality or of reality as a whole.
This skill should be grounded in understanding the various ways people explore or have explored theory construction across time and space in terms of the intersection between individual and group creativities and the influence of social contexts on theory and of theory on social contexts.
A Journey in Intercultural Theory Construction
Epistemologies at the Intersectionof Body and Mind
One of my interests is epistemology, which I understand as the critical explorations of ways of knowing, their procesess of arriving at insights about particular phenomena, their methods of self assessment and of assessment of the knowledge claims of other approaches and how this complex of knowing and evaluation of its own knowledge claims and those of other procedures may itself be assessed.
Within this context, I'm interested in the scope of human perception in the relationship between body and mind, between senses and thought, as these continuities are developed in various cultures, interests I pursue through theory and practice, through action and thought.
Holistic EpistemologiesConjuncting Nature andthe Human Being
English occultist Dion Fortune on the capacity of the human being, through their embodied faculties, to perceive various aspects of nature, visible and invisible, led to my exploring that claim, through application of approaches derived, among other sources, from European Romanticism and Symbolism, which is central to developing such ideas in Western thought.
I explored that idea through working on sacred natural spaces of Benin-City.
The Benin landscape, until the expanding urbanization of the last ten to twenty years, was deeply conducive to such explorations on account of the presence of sacred trees and groves within the city and it's environs, climaxed by the Ogba forest marked by a numinous atmosphere, an arboreal space that has been decimated in creating a housing estate.
Incidentally, Benin sacred natural spaces and European Western and Symbolist thought on nature and the nature spirituality of Western magic are defined by similar premises correlating human cognitive possibilities and the character of nature.
These metaphysical views and their correlative epistemic values operate in terms of holistic epistemologies.
Such metaphysical and epistemic constructs understand human embodiment as an aspect of the multivalent constitution of the universe in its union of matter, mind and spirit.
Underscoring the significance of trans-cultural study, I am able to make these formulations only after reflecting on the outcomes of my practical explorations and their relationships to perspectives from various cultures.
From Western Esotericism toAfrican Epistemologies
I was able to better understand my experiences in validating Fortune's inspirational account, as well as the similarities of my experiences to, as well as difference from those of the Western Romantics and Symbolists through reading Babatunde Lawal's summation of classical Yoruba epistemology in "Representing the Self and it's Metaphysical Other In Yoruba Art".
In explaining the Yoruba concept "oju ona" the ordinary eye or basic perception, and "oju inu" the inward eye or inward or penetrative perception, he lists what may be understood as a perceptual continuum from sensory perception to perception building on or going beyond the senses, from memory, to critical thinking to dreams to extra-sensory perception, moving from conventional to unconventional, extra-sensory perception.
Did the English Romantic thinker William Blake not declare in the 18th to 19th centuries, " I see through my eyes, not with them?", even though what I'm describing had more to do with seeing further with the eyes than is conventional.
Anene Chukwu Umeh's After God is Dibia" describes a similar idea in Igbo thought, in terms of the eye with which one sees the physical world and the eye with which one perceives both the physical and the spiritual worlds.
Umeh adds to his own formulation the possibility of moving beyond discrete perceptions to cosmic perception.
Umeh thereby adds to the African range of similar ideas a cosmic and mystical dimension, which I did not encounter in Yoruba thought, a mystical dimension which I had first discovered in Western occult and Romantic and Symbolist thought, motivating my exploratory journey in the first place, seeking to discover through exploring nature in Benin-City the cosmic sweep the English poet William Wordsworth so beautifully describes, that the European theologian Bonaventure references in Journey of the Mind to God, that Plotinus references in the Enneads, an orientation central to Western aesthetic history generally.
From Nature Animism to NatureMysticism
I pursued this goal through the animistic orientations of Western magic, resonating with the sacred landscape of Benin-City, constructed in terms of animism as a central feature of classical African thought.
This environment engagement enabled me appreciate animism as capable of being borne out of experience of reality, along perhaps with other possibilities, experiences I have undergone.
The Holistic Epistemology ofHindu Srividya
The Hindu Sri Vidya school provides a powerful imagistic expression of similar perceptual continuities in terms of the picture of the Goddess Tripura Sundari.
She is depicted holding her five flowery arrows of kama, pleasure, understood as sensory potential and a primary principle of existence grounded in cosmological reality.
Pleasure is understood, in this context, as an epistemological potential grounded in or related to the senses but going beyond them.
The Goddesses' arrows represent the pleasures enabled by the five senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell, and her bow of desire, if I recall correctly.
The senses are understood as both instruments of pleasure, enabling fixation on basic sense perception as defining reality.
Those perceptions, however, are also understood as capable of acting as bridges or windows into realities beyond conventional perception.
This scope of awareness is subsumed in the cosmic unity the Goddess embodies as the constellation and enabler of all possibilities, as summed up by the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual.
Journeys like the one I have described above make me hungry to learn across cultural and geographical boundaries, seeking to understand how homo sapiens understands itself and the cosmos in which it finds itself, navigating between my embodied experience and African and non-African bodies of thought within the context of the question of how cognitive structures may emanate from as well as transcend their originative contexts.
Nimi Wariboko's Cognitive Nexus
"I...acknowledge all my teachers, past and present, in formal and informal settings, who helped to form and inspire me to work at the uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines.
I am a scholar on theboundary. I work on the boundaries of economics and ethics, economicsand religion, economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophyand theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, andpresent and not-yet-present knowledges.
My thinking always functions atan interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/nor. This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating betweenspheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site oferotic, new, refreshing insights and lights.
I am talking of the uncanny
non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in history.
My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that is alwaysapproaching and withdrawing approach.
This book reflects this orientationof my scholarship. And I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance inwalking and working with me in this unhomely space".
Nimi Wariboko, The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, 20
On Wed, Sep 27, 2023, 6:11 AM Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
I meant to complete the opening sentences by saying no one like cornelius can take us back to the 60s and 70s when we began to study african literature. He was there w the founding scholars and authors, and i find his memories truly invaluable.Ken
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 7:43:12 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone AfricaI'd love to respond to moses's two postings and cornelius's recollections and posting. No one on this list can go back to the 70s or before and tell us about what it was like to have studied african literature, then at its inception. He forces us to return to that question, what is african literature, and a little bit, what might "inception" mean.Of course it dates back much earlier than the 50s, when people like achebe or laye were writing, or the even earlier south african authors who predated them.And of course the still earlier oral performances and traditions go back a while, with the griots, and then back further and further, with a dash of sundiata and other epics that go back hundreds of years.There is no "beginning" to african literature, in a meaningful sense, any more than there is to any other literature since the genres and languages in which they were composed always, always, had predecessors who influenced the creators.So maybe we can talk about some kind of preliminary moment, not entirely arbitrary, when this movement back in search of the origins of meaning is temporarily halted, as in putting a tack into a piece of fabric. This is the figure used by derrida, coming from lacan, to stop the movement of signifiers coming from previous signifiers, differentiated from others into order to establish, temporarily, meaning.
I don't mind referring to lacan or derrida or soyinka or anyone else whose notions might help me figure out some literary issue.That said, i have to say i agree with moses that the usefulness of the theory needs to somehow work, somehow be relevant to the immediate context in which meaning or affect is being produced by the book or art or film. Nothing nothing nothing is so awfully tedious is reading papers about african works that are, somehow, artificially evoked in some play of meaning that just is not part of the world of experience and history that gave meaning to the images and words used. Africa is real, no matter how hybrid, and only feet on the red soil can really give a place from which to view its world.
To make moses's point more meaningful to me, as he cited a bunch of marxist thinkers, it would make little sense to attempt a class based classical marxist reading on african social structures. On the other hand, it makes little sense to try to read sembene ousmane's novels stories and films without understanding precisely his intellectual formation in marseilles, working as a union man, ensconced in an intellectual milieu driven largely by the marxist of the 1950s in france. He returned with ideas of revolution, of class conscious thinking, of religion as the opiate of thepeople, etc etc., that blatantly marked his early and middle works—along with his evocations of race and racism, and his attacks on neocolonialism, not least of which included senghor.Too much to say here: the theoretical apparatus used to explore sembene's work could betray it if applied mechanically, as althusser might well be; or as hegel might be, with the dialectuic,etc. but if a useful dialogue might result, let's give it a chance.
The african voices i hear in my ears—let's say the inimitable, the most wonderful of wonderful, birago diop or hampate ba,—might well serve moses's program of fostering african grounded thought; even as approaching diop's "contes" always benefits from harold scheub and other experts in oral literature; and hampate ba's islam was profoundly marked by sufism, with its african roots reaching far and wide, so that echoes of what cornelius cites, the classic Conference of Birds, helps us to understand his masterworks of Islamic masters, notably Thierno Bokar, or Kaidara , and much more.
But i need more to understand the overriding concepts at play in constructing genres, in working around past connections without being lost in originary thought; so i reread glissant again to help get me there; and as we know, glissant was himself influenced byDeleuze and guattari.I read moses's piece, alongside cornelius's radically different approach, and try to talk with them in writing this. This is how theory is developed, by a dialogue, not a monologue. A dialogue with past writers, with fellow thinkers, and with texts. Moses's dialogue insists, rightly, that we find a way to bring into the discussion, and into those who hear it, the relevant language formed by the relevance to the location.Ken
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of cornelius...@gmail.com <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 4:34:17 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone Africa
Thanks for the explanations
Just a short aside:
Dear Professor Kenneth Harrow,
Convener and host of that wonderful 12th Annual African Literature Association conference at Michigan State University in April, 1986, at which, among many others, this paper was presented.
Given the diversities in background it should be good that all suggestions/ recommendations ought to be on the table, yours, Edward Said's , Bernth Lindfors' - a united/disunited/disparate composite approach. Back in Sierra Leone Michael Brunson made a difference to bringing Eliot and Shakespeare back to life, as you too must have done for your students with some of the literary icons at the various venues of Higher education where you have taught at the Cheikh Anta Diop and Mongo Beti and Albert Camus Countries.
Back in the Ghana of 1970 , in very unctuous tones friend Cyprian Lamar Rowe proclaimed to me personally, at some length, the glories of Chinua Achebe, who he venerated as a genuine African pioneer holding African traditions high - this was at a time when I had hardly read any Achebe, friend James Ngugi as he was called then, was writer in residence, and Ayi Kwei Armah was the man of the moment, the new kid on the block with his then much celebrated "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born" and "Fragments". Cyprian thought that Armah seemed to be looking in , into Africa and African society, as an outsider.To this day, it would seem that the African-American prefers the pristine , idyllic picture of pastoral Africa as things were before the White Man came, started kidnapping people, and mucked up everything; prefer that to the other complex realities of post colonial modernities.
When asked to comment on corruption in Nigeria, Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan was furious
I presume that the African Literature under purview has been mostly authored in English and French, , is mostly read by English and French-speaking readers, and of course various translations of the originals into Hausa, Xhosa, Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo etc, perhaps even into some of the other languages that Abdul Bangura speaks (a good reason for learning other languages of course being to be able to read some of the great works written in those languages - thinking of the ancient world's Greek and Latin and Sanskrit, and that in modern times Sweden's Gunnar Ekelöf learnt Persian in order to read Hafez, whilst Finland's Georg Henrik Von Wright acquired the English Language so that he could inherit Ludwig Wittgenstein's chair of philosophy at Cambridge
Another presumption is the various backgrounds/ lack of background of the teachers, readers, students and authors of the distinct category that's referred to as " African Literature" - the literary output of Africans, by which definition, at this stage even if Mo Yan were to have written "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" in the Kalabari Language , he would still remain Chinese , just as Conrad remains "Polish British" , V.S. Naipaul, "a Trinidadian-born British writer", Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah "a British American philosopher and writer ", and ours truly, Toyin Omoyeni Falola of course, Pure Yoruba Nigeria. Somebody wants to make a theory out of that? As Einstein famously quipped, "If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew"
Right on ! Other assumptions, this and that writer's alleged racism , Conrad, Joyce Cary making fun and having a good time at someone else's expense in Mister Johnson, the itinerant Naipaul's non-fiction ( some of it Islamophobia too) some of Paul Theroux ( Fong and the Indians, as inevitably what happens in anybody's travelogues - the perspectives of one civilizational background entering the time zones of another kind of civilizations, be it Marco Polo, Sir Richard Burton's pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and I assume that what Marx said about his friend Lassalle fits nicely into the categories known as racism and antisemitism.
And, what if - God forbid Lord Lugard and Achebe, and his lot had never existed, how would you have planned introducing African Literature to your blue-eyed American students? How, for example would you set about teaching African literature to Joe Biden ( I assume that the only "African Literature" that he has ever read would be "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" written by his former boss, Barack Obama, the Kenyan-American.
What about Donald J. Trump ( I watched him, same blonde shock of hair, cheerful & upbeat delivering a speech in South Carolina yesterday) how would you go about teaching him Great African Literature , if he were your student, you must admit, a no ordinary run of the mill American student ? In both cases, I'd cut out Said and all that jazz about Joseph Conrad in his Orientalism , and I'd dispense with Chinua Achebe and Okonkwo altogether, I'd start with some down to earth poetry, request that he read to me and the class, aloud, The Tragedy of White Injustice by Marcus Garvey , that he sing some of Mzwakhe Mbuli, and round him off with some James Baldwin; and I'm sure that he would have become very interested in Black Literature after those three, Garvey, Mbuli, and Baldwin , especially Trump on his way to making America Great Forevermore.
This excerpt from pages 190 -191 of Edward Said's Orientalism sounds like what's happening in Nigeria the African Diaspora right now with the Africanisation of knowledge etc .
"It was certainly true that by the middle of the nineteenth century France ,no less than England and the rest of Europe , had a flourishing knowledge industry of the sort that Flaubert feared, Great numbers of texts were being produced, and more important, the agencies and institutions for their dissemination and propagation were everywhere to be found. As historians of science and knowledge have observed, the organisation of scientific and learned fields that took place in the nineteenth century was both rigorous and all encompassing. Research became a regular activity; there was a regulated exchange of information, and agreement on what the problems were as well as consensus on the appropriate paradigms for research and its results." and then it gets even more interesting further down the page fast forward to 2053 and we would be reading about people at post -Cornel West's Harvard clutching their laptops and demonstrating " Africa for African scholars y'all…
"
On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 07:05:04 UTC+2 Harrow, Kenneth wrote:
Hi cornelius,conrad played an important role in Said's own work. He saw conrad as subverting the rationality of colonial discourse, and did it brilliantly in Heart of Darkness. Said and Achebe debated the question of conrad, conrad's racism. Maybe achebe won that debate in explaining how conrad manifested that racism, but since he wrote around 1900, he had to be placed in the perspective of that period. I thought said's interpretation of Heart of Drkness was stronger than Achebe, and Achebe was stronger in attacking conrad's racism.
But said wanted us to view african literature through the optic of resistance to european thought, i.e., the critique of orientalism.As i taught more and more african literature i came resent the view that held that the only or best way to convey to students how to undo western conventional/racist/colonialist views of africa was to begin with tarzan (or heart of darkness). Eventually i decided that instead of losing a week ormore to such an approach, i'd devote it to african texts which implicitly or explicitly laid before the students the real values of african culture and peoples, and they would come to be able to forge arguments that could counter the dumb tv images they had been fed on.
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or Arrow of God, presented igbo (Ibo, he'd say), unapologetically accomplished this,, and many other works of the 50s, like L'enfant noir or une vie de boy or le pauvre christ de bomba or birago diop's wonderful contes, or negritude poetry; or soyinka's early plays, etc did the same, without my having to lose a week. And i think it became more convincing to the students, approaching it that way. I.e., i avoided the defensiveness implicit in beginning with graham greene etc. or other colonial authors, and showing their faults. Another example is the film, Sanders of the River!!!!! Paul robeson ultimately had to apologize for having made it.Ken
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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of cornelius...@gmail.com <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2023 7:18:33 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone AfricaRe -" when Said, who was the greatest figure of his time, told us, africanists, to begin with Conrad, that was horrible," ( according to one Kenneth Harrow who would have much preferred that " us africanits" should have begun with Achebe instead, by which I suppose he means that it's better to begin with the devil that you know, the one you love….black man, critical race theory, standing ovation etc talking shop, where is Wofa Akwasi when I need him? "Restless intelligence" indeed, like Karl Marx…
With Tarzan in the picture (at the cinema) when elephants rumble and tumble in the jungle, we know that it's the grass that suffers and all that; but this juicy bit of literary gossip preceding and following the line that begins " A subliminal awareness that his visions of social transformation might be deceptive may explain Russell's friendship with Conrad" has contributed to my still not being able to figure out why a literary icon of the stature of Joseph Conrad should be singled out or assigned as an unlikely recommendation from Edward Said
Yes, in this forum, Conrad has occasionally been lumped together with the man some people here love to despise and hate, namely V.S.Naipaul: but let us not forget what the not so unaware or unwary Edward Said did singlehandedly did with his Orientalism which since then has impacted mightily on African Studies with new insightful approaches which have been transposed to critical receptions/ studies of African Literature, so called.
Afrocentric :Jimmy Dludlu : Inyoni Iya phapha
On Monday, 25 September 2023 at 04:20:18 UTC+2 Harrow, Kenneth wrote:
moses, thanks so much for engaging me with your points.i generally agree with everything you said. when Said, who was the greatest figure of his time, told us, africanists, to begin with Conrad, that was horrible, but expectable because, like spivak, had not spent any real time in africa, did not know it, and barely knew its literature. they were important for us to move on to what we came to know as postcolonial theory.but when i cited mbembe and gikandi, or i should have added mudimbe—as is the case when i cite you or falola—these are thinkers formed by a ecumenical library of texts. if i were to cite friends in senegal or cameroon whose work had not led them to living abroad, they still would have been drawing upon a library that included european as well as african thinkers.
my experience at the universities in africa was unfortunately often as you painted it: the prestige was applied too often to european thinkers, even to very old-fashioned works as with structuralism. structuralism which should have gone out of fashion 50 years ago.
but if i were to characterize your thinking, or that of the others i cite above, how can we say it is not marked by a plethora of african and western texts. how can we cite, for instance, the incredibly wonderful glissant, without seeing that amalgam; or fanon; or more recently michelle wright or you name them.
can you draw a line between the euro-american and african thought so neatly?
you know my work is primarily focused on african film. it is impossible to cite african filmmakers whose work was not marked by collaboration that ultimately enjoined european or american workers. even the great tunde kelani, with his own studios, began in the old days where brits were involved in the cinema studios inherited from colonial days.the same is largely true of african literature. how much of the early classics were penned by young africans living in europe, from senghor to diop to beti to oyono to ouolaguem to soyinka to kenyatta, etc etc.
now as we look at african authors, like chiminanda adichie, or teju cole, like mati diop and tons of young filmmakers, they are first generation immigrants who went to school abroad and carry their parents' africanness into their european/american framed works.
lastly, how could people like myself, ensconced in 50 years of work with african texts and peoples, not be marked by that experience and see the world differently from those living around us with their notions of africa limited by safaris at best?
we are mentally and culturally mixed, as bhabha really said it best. or, as appiah said, repeatedly, brilliantly.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 9:30 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone AfricaKen,
Thanks for your thoughtful contribution. As you guessed, I appreciate Skip Gates' answer of using what strengthens your argument. My only caveat would be that if it comes down to a choice between an African and a Euro-American theory, the African scholar in Africa should gravitate towards the former.
The problem we have in Nigeria (and now I'm hearing Ghana and Kenya) is that our scholars there default to Euro-American theorists. So, in a rather perverse and reversed sense, they're choosing their theorists based on race--on the Whiteness of the thinker/theorist. And that choice is predicated on the age-old phenomenon of colonial mentality: anything produced by the white man is superior, foundational, and universal and would give a credibility and prestige to my work that the formulation of a black or African theorist would not.
This is a xenophilic reversal of the discrimination you speak of, which you, as a Jewish whit
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