Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - COMMUNITY CONCEPTS OF ATROCITY AND ATROCITY-PREVENTION

magnificent- 

Dibie na agwo otule, o debelu ike ya na elu? Igbo proverb meaning, The witch who concocts diarrhea, is she hiding her own anus in the sky?

my only problem with this one is that it smacks of the misogyny in the name of witchcraft that women have suffered in Africa and Europe.

one wonders  why these stigmatizations about evil use of magical powers in traditional African and pre-modern Western contexts are almost always directed at women, and hardly ever  at men, hardly ever at wizards.

the rescue of the image of the witch-often a concocted, imagined image, began with gerald gardner's founding of the religion of wicca in the 20th century and has mushroomed with such fictional works as the harry potter novels and films, one of the latest being the very successful  film adaptation of the deborah harkness novelistic series a discovery of witches, new developments in which the concept of the witch has been reworked to mean a  way,  that embrace both men and women, of working with  spiritual powers.

i look forward to a similar liberating development in africa.

correlative concepts in yoruba culture, for example, are ''aje''( the bearers, often feminine,  of mysterious transformative powers),  ''awon iya wa osoronga'' (our arcane mothers) and ''oso'' ( a wizard, more or less, i understand) -my own translations.

what Gardner and his successors did in developing modern western witchcraft can be emulated in Africa since the information showing their methods as well as the African resources that can be similarly deployed is readily available in print.

Mercedes Morgana Bonilla, in the US, I think, responding to the international character of Yoruba origin Orisha spirituality, where the aje concept is found, was able to sketch out a theoretical and practice directed development of Yoruba aje spirituality, the first effort to publicly develop what at best had  always been a shadowy spirituality even in Yorubaland but her efforts were marred by accusations of plagiarizing Teresa Washinton's books coming from her then University of Ife PhD, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature and Architects of Existence, as well  fraudulent claims of connection with Yoruba aje as well as a non-functional system of training, fleecing people for money.

I recognized her, however, as being a powerful ritual artist, adept in the use of images in evoking the arcane and the numinous, seamlessly organizing a broad range of sources  around her imagistic evocations, as evident at her Facebook pages. 

Even if she plagiarized Washington, I understand her version of aje to be more mature than that of Washington's first book, which I am acquainted with, because I understand Washington as assimilating and trying to justify the horrific depictions of aje in ese ifa, Ifa literature and trying to justify them as depicting the aje as agents of dreadful justice, a view the sustainability of which i'm sceptical about.

Even if Mercedes  were guilty of what she was accused of, accusations she was unable to convince me she was not guilty of when I chatted with her, such issues of attribution and claims of non-existent connections could be addressed by owning up to them and reworking her system to steer clear of such falsehoods that often bedevil efforts to create a spirituality.

She seems to have chosen instead to disband her practice or its public projection. Such people as the US olorisha Ayele Kumari have taken up the challenge of developing versions of aje spirituality but it might not be done as boldly and in a manner that is as readily visible as Mercedes' methods.

Yoruba aje spirituality is a currently fragmented structure of ideas evident in ese ifa, Ifa literature, Gelede and other female centred spiritualities from Osun to Iya Mopo, female centred forms powerfully described and at times developed by the philosophical thought and visual art of Susanne Wenger and such  scholarship as that of the Drewals and Babatunde Lawal on Gelede and scholarship on Ogboni, in which Lawal's work is pre-eminent.

One of the best chapters in Lawal's Gelede book opens with that superb Aayajo Asuwada poem translated and discussed by Akiwowo. Lawal seems to link the varied expressions of the feminine principle in  Orisha spirituality with the Asuwada principle of terrestrial and cosmic unity Akiwowo highlights as dramatized by the Ayajo Asuwada poem, evident even within the destructive powers in the universe as they are intertwined with the creative, the unity of creation and destruction in the cosmos being one motif  that may be distilled from what can be described as the contradictory depictions of aje in ese ifa, between bloodthirsty, irrationally destructive creatures and a creatively fundamental feminine essence, embodied in all women, indispensable to the workings of the universe.

A correlative development of feminine spiritual agents, unifying creative and destructive possibilities,  occured in the centuries of Hindu history, with Kali and possibly with the dakinis in Tibetan Buddhism. Such comparative refinements may be employed in taking advantage of, distilling and integrating the convoluted depictions of feminine spiritual powers in the Orisha tradition.

Apologies for seeming to go off on a tangent, but the relationship between the Ayajo Asuwada poem and insights of interpersonal unity represented by proverbs of the kind Kissi is looking for suggests such proverbs may be anchored in or demonstrated as dramatising an ontology, a view of the nature of being, itself further grounded within a metaphysics, a perspective of the essence, structure and dynamism of the cosmos, worked out, in Ayajo Asuwada, in terms of an imaginative account of the creation of the world in its derivation from an ultimate identity of which each existent is an expression, an ontological unity expressed in the coherence that enables the animate and inanimate structuring of the world, from the gathering of strands to constitute hair on the head, the coming together of trees to form forests and more.

The brilliantly imagistic proverb Agozino quotes, on the other hand, both dramatizes the need for enlightened self interest through recognizing mutuality of effects in what affects communities but also provokes questions as to why the evil magical agent, the rogue spiritual character untethered from creative social values in the traditional Nigerian and perhaps sub Saharan African context, the African version of the pre-modern Western image of the witch, is often a woman, leading to the question of how factual that picture is, and of the factuality of the correlative witch image in African contexts, those of pre-modern Europe being now understood as pure superstition, giving way to a modern creative reworking of the image of the witch.

I have attached  Akiwowo's paper being referenced, and what I think is another of his papers on a similar subject. I wanted to add  two engagements with his work but gmail would not accept the resulting mail size. There is a need of a collected volume of his works and engagements with it, if such a volume does not exist yet.

thanks

toyin

On Fri, 13 Sept 2024 at 23:08, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Dibie na agwo otule, o debelu ike ya na elu? Igbo proverb meaning, The witch who concocts diarrhea, is she hiding her own anus in the sky? Or as Marley sang, when the rain falls, it won't fall on one man's housetop. Remember that.

Biko

On Friday 13 September 2024 at 16:39:23 GMT-4, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Wonderful. There are a good number of these

On Fri, Sep 13, 2024, 6:47 PM 'Edward Kissi' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

As many of you know, I have been involved in research and teaching on the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights, Genocide-prevention, Atrocity-prevention, and the prevention of identity-based violence for many years. Some may even be aware of my article in African Security Review in which I argue for a concept of "moral pan-Africanism"  as a framework for sustainable regional peace and security in Africa.

 

In recent years, I have worked with many international organizations, museums, and academic institutions to find practical community-based solutions to genocide and identity-based violence. Sadly, these atrocities continue in all human societies with maddening regularity. Some would argue that their recurrence, despite the large body of scholarship and teaching on their causes, prevention, and impact, expose the limitations of genocide-prevention research and activism, or the incorrigible nature of humans as perpetrators.

 

As someone who grew up in a village in Ghana organized on community cultural and moral logics embedded in proverbs, folklores, and axioms, I am aware of values-laden proverbs that served my community well. Some of these community proverbs highlighted the "intersectionality" of human life, the moral necessity to defend the dignity of every human being, and the harm to self and society inherent in hate-speech. On intersectionality of human destinies, my Kwawu people say that "obi afumkwan nkye na asi obi de mu". This could be translated into English as: it does not take long for one person's path to his farm to intersect with another's. This community view that our lives are interconnected and what has been done to others can also be done to us made people in my local community admonish anyone who incited violence against others. On harm to oneself and community when people maltreat their fellow human beings, the Kwawu have a warning: wo twa wo tekrema we a na wonwee nam biara. Crudely translated: when you cut your tongue and eat it, you have not eaten any meat. Or, elegantly, if you roast your tongue for dinner you have not eaten any meaningful meal. You have harmed yourself and your community instead.

 

Certainly, these community maxims never banished conflict in Kwawu society but they warned against it. They provided theoretical frameworks for the prevention of atrocities.

 

I have been thinking of compiling and comparing such community-driven responses to atrocities, genocide and identity-based violence in Africa. Therefore, I am looking for many African community proverbs, maxims, stories, etc, that "discouraged" violence against groups based on their identity (ethnicity, beliefs, appearance, etc), or advocated inter-group harmony as the foundation of community security. Or proverbs and maxims that "encouraged" such violence and how that is explained.

 

My aim here is to look deeper into African societies and discover valuable traditions, values, mores, etc, that have been overlooked by genocide and identity-based violence researchers.  I want to examine the commonalities in these community values and think about how communities can be viable partners in genocide-prevention and the prevention of identity-based violence in Africa. I want to use these as conceptual bedrocks for teaching a course on "applied genocide-prevention" in a certificate program for genocide-prevention practitioners.

 

I need your help! You can share your community anti-atrocity proverbs, maxims, axioms (and their English translations) in this forum or you can share them privately with me at ekissi31@gmail.com, or ekissi@usf.edu. You will be credited for your contribution.

 

 

Edward Kissi

 

 

 

Edward Kissi, Ph.D

Professor

School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies

University of South Florida

4202 East Fowler Avenue

Tampa, Florida 33620

813 974-7784

 

 

 

Africans and the Holocaust

 

Integrating sub-Saharan Africa into a historical and cultural study of the Holocaust

 

Caught between the Union Jack and the Nazi Swastika: African Protests over Ambiguous Status under British Imperialism and Potential Transfer to Nazi Colonialism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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