Hmmm. Haba! Slow down! What are you babbling about? Can't you simply make your point without looking like you are fighting the mother of all hangovers? Do you have a beef with Pius? I will try to help you, let's see... We have a little problem here. Let's get a bit technical here: You have made absolutely no sense here. If I have to give you feedback on your writing, it is this: You are a very enthusiastic but sloppy writer and people form an unfavorable opinion about your scholarship regardless of whether they agree with you or not. You tend to rush your very first draft to print regardless of its shape. Not nice.
Without taking sides in this unnecessary roughness that you just started, Just read what you just wrote now and compare it to the quality of what you are responding to. Night and day. One person used a spell checker. Not you. One person read his entire piece aloud to himself. Not you. None of this would be my business except that your loud yeye self just woke me up from sleep demanding that I read your nonsense. I have just spent half an hour trying to make sense of this, whossai. What is your problem? Why do you insist on wasting my time this beautiful Sunday? If Pius responds to your "essay" I will fine him many delicious things for rewarding nonsense with a response. Okay, let me help you again like I helped you the last time. Take this piece, tear it up into 1,000 pieces, find some comma, and some full stops and then start over ;-)
Our people, mek I yab Biko? Mek I yab am? I am in a bad mood today O, I am ready for this man! Oya hol' my shirt, wait mek I come down from my okada...
I go show you pepper when I come back from church, yeye sinner! I bind your yeye essay with the blood of em em... Wait for me! Yeye man!
Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Payos, Your inferiority complex is showing in all your writings: the monarch is not even concealing his nakedness to the enlightened who alone were presumably privileged to the truth of the clothednness of the nakedness of the noble in a democratizing world that is demanding increasing accountability and partisanship in the face of what Stuart Hall wall call authoritarian populism and even sheer group-think authoritarianism. Whenever someone identifies any originality that contributes to progressive possibilities outside the narrow biographical accident of brother Payos and without devaluing his rich cultural heritage, he sniffs a superiority complex where there is none intended but only manages to reemphasize his own peculiar mess (pekelmese) of inferiority complex. Here, the suspicion is that Francophone and Anglophone Africa are in a pseudo struggle for supremacy (linguistioc but not political economic) to the extent that students majoring in a Francophone language from what Museveni of Uganda would call a Bantuphone country would necessarily feel themselves to be in competion with students from a Francophone country studying the same Francophony but with absolutely no reference to the fact that imperialism does not depend on the tongue you speak. Strange, innit, as Londoners would say or ent as Trinidiadians would have it, or abi no be so, for pigden? That question would never have occurred to the rest of us who thought that an additional European language was both unjustifiable and unnecessary when we had not mastered our own native tongues and who undertook to write and pass WASC exams in our mother tongues as a matter of pride and even without teachers. For despite the pretensions to a smattering of quotations from their mothert tongue, most of the superiorist scholars avoided writing exams in their mother tongue under the excuse that they had no teachers in the asubject and even when they had teachers, wondered what jobs an expertise in vernacular could attract compared to a proud command of the whiteman's language with curious privileges of missing a whole year of university in order to improve on the tongue of the foreigner that former cohorts enjoyed more by being transplanted to French soil, especially in competition against fellow Africans who could never articluate the whateman's tongue as clearly as the superiorsist Senghore or Cesaire who would accept membership of the Community of the ancestors of Gauls to complete autonomy. Ahaa! The Tiger does not profess its Tigritude not just because the writer does not speak Tigrese as Senghore retorted but because no matter what tongue the writer speaks in, he/she could never mimic the tiger as Soyinka implied!: 'We had swag. Don't mind me. I am trying to use the dialect of young Nigerians on Facebook. My friend, Ikhide Ikheloa, says we must constantly play catch-up with that generation in our essays. I guess swag means swagger. Our swag devolved from a certain sociology of superiority that defined Nigerian-ness in relation to the rest of Africa. It wasn't just that geographical size, resources, and population meshed in the imaginary of the rulers and the elite and gave them a conceited image of Nigeria as the giant and big brother of Africa, an image that trickled down from a mediocre rulership to a sheepish followership, it was also about optics, about what you saw in "the practice of everyday life" (apologies to Michel de Certeau) in Nigeria in the 1980s.' The shakara of Payos!
The swag of French in West Africa sounds strange to those of us who seriously believed that French was marginal to the fate of West Africa. We used to jump through the window to escape another lesson in conjugate la verb because we seriously believed that we had not much to rely on from French in our livelihood or Enlightenment; and how much we regret that childish bravado but not as much as the superiorists assume. When the French teacher got a French Peugeot 504 car from the French company, Feugerolle, that was constructing the Enugu-Port Harcourt express road, we realized that French was somewhat envious but still not as important as the traditional subjects that would question the imagined attitudes of French superiorism in Anglophone-Bantuphone West Africa except in the sense of mastering two of the Master's languages compared to the one-sided mastery of the evoluee over the language of a single Prospero community by a single Caiban.
So brother Payos must have been inducted into a secret cult of superioirism that demands suspicion of any other claim to validity as a claim to attempts to inferioirize his preferences in his subjective judgment of tastes, yeah whatever, in whatever ethnic mould they might be. So for Dokinta Payos the impish, as always, the question is not whose underdevelopment is greater than whose but, what is to be done? The answer could be at different levels. 1) Stop feeling superior to fellow Africans as a rule and stop smelling an ambush in your imaginary struggle to see whose imperialism is better than the other in a vain attempt to privilege archaic despotism in preference to republican democracy.; 2) Stop generalizing your inferiority complex to the rest of the discourse about the question of African liberation by seeking which African culture to defend against your own very selective chosen exemplars in terms of whose Mercedes is bigger than whose; 3) Prescribe solutions to the problem instead of assuming that the answers are embodied in one, some, or in all of the above; it could be none of the above! Biko --- On Fri, 8/6/10, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
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