Re: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?

Peace Ehiedu--Those are all great points. I want to pick up #9. You said:

9. Finally, however much we debate "Africa" from the distant or even from within, if the terms of our perception and description are derived from the defective conceptual simplifications of the world system; and not from the ideological and political and practical complexity of "actually existing Africa" much of what we say and debate will be side-tracked by the outcome of "actual African history in the making" that is not reducible to the familiar lazy constructions of Africa in terms of "corruption", "poverty" and "incapacity".

I agree that "corruption", "poverty" and "incapacity" are conceptually "lazy." And, as I noted in my previous post, some versions of the "World System" are simplistic--virtually all of them are Eurocentric. But that needn't be the case. Africans did not need Marx or Eric Wolf to inform them that we live in global system. Marcus Garvey figured that out in the 1920s. Chief Alfred Sam had figured it out a decade or so before Garvey. He traveled, c. 1915, from what was then Gold Coast (now Ghana) to the USA, purchased a ship, and set sail with about 40 or so black North Americans, destination Salt Pond, Central Region, Ghana.. And roughly a century before them (1829) one David Walker, a black abolitionist in Boston, addressed his polemical Appeal to the "coloured citizens of the world." And well before any of them Ivan Van Sertima informed us that Africans from the Mali empire arrived in the so-called New World before Columbus, c. 13 th century (i think). Columbus himself affirms this in his diary or at least passes on the rumor as told to him. I think these examples clearly meet your criteria of "actual African history in the making." kzs

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