No world power ever emerges by drawing exclusively on its own resources be
they intellectual or otherwise. They appropriate everything useful and do
not attempt to reinvent the wheel all the time in the name of authentic self
and autonomy. In fact, most of the knowledges we ascribe to western
civilization today, as you know, have their roots in Arabic, Chinese and
African civilizations, etc! We are witness to the wholesale stealing of
knowledge the Chinese have done in the last twenty years. We quote Fanon as
if he was drawing on African oral traditions, he was, to remind ourselves
drawing on and engaging established traditions of French thought just as
people like Sartre and Foucault at the time. I know the dangers of
Eurocentrism and we must eschew it. But I also think we must be cautious in
our obsessive search for exclusive Afrocentric foundations.
As for Adedibu's picture. Whao. I could not help being amused on the one
hand and thinking, oh Pius has played the Joker again! The game is over! I
suspect that the people in that picture are community/ward leaders who
despite not being professors fully understand the history of politics in
Ibadan and Nigeria in such arcane details that we cannot rival. Like
bandits, they belong in real prison. This further helps our argument. There
is no mystery to this debate. It is as simple as saying what my
kindergartener knows: If the system allows it, leaders anywhere and
everywhere can do and become anything! That image is thus not an evidence of
an African exception, though it is an image in a private living room that
seems remotely unconnected to us and anything else. We can recognize
currency! We will be mistaken to think it is coming from government sources
alone. It might, for all you know, be coming from SHELL or CHENEY!!!
Peace,
Bode
-----Original Message-----
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
[mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
eiwerieb@hunter.cuny.edu
Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2010 11:04 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?
Thanks Shabazz.
Yes your analyis meets my criteria partly.
I should reinforce your point about these great African thinkers who
already saw a world system from a pan-African view point. This is a deep and
long standing aspiration of all liberated African thinkers to ensure that a
powerful, self-directed Africa emerges that is part of the routine workings
of any global system.
2. The challenge of to the present generation of liberated Africans globally
is not merely to affirm the imperialist view or imply that the present
global system is an inescapable prison house. Rather it is to use the
resources of our era: intellectual, technological ideological etc to
contribute to ensuring that a powerful Africa emerges that makes history and
is not an object of and reactor to the doings of others. For as Frantz Fanon
eloquently stated in, The Wretched of the Earth, "Each generation must out
of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.."
3. A related challenge is how to formulate new conceptual frameworks with
which to view our on-going experiences, not as abberations but as part of
the complexity of a re-emergent people, involved not in a unilinear journey
but in a dialectical, untidy and complex historical journey being enacted in
multiple sites and at different levels in the African world by Africans
exercising their agency and not engaged in sterile debates about whether or
not Africans have agency.
4. Existing frameworks whether from Marx, Derrida, Foucoult, IMF, World Bank
and even the UN are not very useful to true self-understanding. In fact they
are distortive distractions to self-understanding as well as sites for
grand standing of who knows best and not about seeking concrete, doable
solutions to the challenges of the present.
5. The easiest thing to do is criticism, deconstruction and destruction and
the reiteration of established banalites.
6.What present day Africa needs is careful thinking, bold visions, and
autonomous strategies for Africa's take off and renaissance in the 21st
century as a powerful, materially prosperous and self-respecting and
respected member of the global community. This is a summary of the
philosophy of liberated development outlined in first chapter of my book,
Nigerian Technology Development Since Independence (2004).
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