perhaps you will disagree with my point; i don't go 100% with your
basing your claims on the writings of ch anta diop or chancellor
williams; but will happily leave that debate to the historians, of which
i am definitely not one. maybe you could call me an amateur in history,
but merely a relatively well read one.
but really, i did not want to communicate that africans got their human
rights education from europeans. i am saying something that i hope is
much more important, namely, that the exchange between europe and africa
was multifaceted. for many years i read it as a one-way street of
oppression. i read it more in the way khatibi did when he wrote about an
exchange that entailed, let's call it, dimensions of closeness as well
as distance, dimensions of giving as well as taking; dimensions even of
love as well as hatred. i would say dimensions of oppression--even
fundamentally oppression given the colonial context--but also positive
encounters.
i was not, not, not, trying to say the west invented "human rights" and
gave it to africans. i did say, and think, that the west had its ideas
of liberal human rights and gender rights agendas, and that in some
instances africans were receptive to those ideas, assimilated them,
reterritorialized them, made them their own. there were many forms of
assimilation; if you consider the women writers i cited, they saw
themselves as being liberated because of their schooling and encounters
with europeans who considered themselves purveyors of enlightenment.
if you want to tell me both were deluded, i would answer, well, yes, to
some extent. but not so completely. the europeans were certainly deluded
in their notions of being superior and extending a superior
civilization. they were conquerors, after all, and their "giving" was
typically condescending, the way we think of 1950s liberalism in the u.s.
i would very much argue, along with you, that the women were not
passive, empty vessels into whom their teachers, sometimes beloved (as
mariama ba says), force-fed them their thoughts. even if they themselves
thought so, i would argue, with you, that they were participants in a
society where gender relations had a long history, and were marked by
complex relations of power, not one way streets of patriarchal domination.
but clearly the african women who built their subjectivities around what
values they found positive were claiming and making of those ideas what
worked best for themselves. they called themselves New Africans in the
1930s and 1940s; danced rhumbas, got dressed up for clubs, organized
political parties, participated in the building of urban cultures. All
of this, all of this under the multiple influences of african
understandings of the self, of european models, of muslim or christian
or traditional religious positions. and all of it subjected to images of
the self conveyed in films, posters, photos, even radio shows. it was
all there, all shaping a sense of who one was, especially in the cities.
i can see this in the photos and posing of subjects of seydou keita, can
see it in films like Afrique sur Seine, can read it in the music and
arts of the period, in nigeria and in senegal, two countries whose
cultural history i have taught (in basic terms only, admittedly).
culture was mixed; how could the people not be as well?
i think we all take ideas from each other, though under conditions of
unequal power distribution. even a slave can take from the master-slave
relationship and appropriate conditions of subjectivity that eventuate
in his supplanting the master--this is hegel's thesis.
your appeal to historical values merely confirms my own notion that
EVERY people, every "civilization" is the heir of multiple threads, not
of any single originary foundation. that's where i part from afrocentric
reductions of that foundation to egypt.
none of us just receives culture: we add, and shape it, as we do
language. and sometimes it is under conditions of occupation and
conquest. indeed, that's why latinate languages are spoken in europe,
despite the germanic rule.
please excuse the lengthy rumination.
let me repeat: i do not, do not believe it was "lessons learned from the
West," but rather a complicated cultural exchange, under conditions of
unequal power, which each obtained elements from the other; and where
some found much more that was profitable to them in this exchange than
others.
if you've not yet read hampate ba's masterpiece, Wangrin, i commend it
to you. it paints a compelling portrait of a brilliant manipulative
trickster who turns the european system against itself for his own
purposes and gain.
if you think it is just fiction, i commend to you the autobiography of
birago diop who became the administrator for veterinary services for all
west africa, and who took what he pleased, discarded what displeased of
the french. his brilliant Tales of Amadou Koumba give us the best
renditions of african tales, tales from west africa, rendered in french.
come to think of it, isn't this true of achebe's work as well?
best
ken
On 6/29/11 6:17 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:
> bro ken,
>
> You are pushing a false thesis that Fela Kuti debunked long ago - the idea that human rights were gifts from Beasts of No Nation to African human beings. Please refer to Cheikh Anta Diop (Precolonial Black Africa) and Chancellor Williams (The Destruction of African Civilization) to see that African declarations of the rights of all human beings (not just of free men) and respect for human rights predated the Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights.
>
> The novels that you cite pale into insignificance in the annals of African women's rights in comparison to the daring raids of Harriet Tubman to free the enslaved; Jamaican Maroon women did the same; the Aba Women's War of 1929 against British colonialism; The Abeokuta Women's deposing of the colonial puppet - the Alake; the Kikuyu women's resistance against forced labor in the 1950s; and the South African women's resistance against Pass Law in the 1950s.
>
> Far from being lessons learned from the West, women's rights, just like human rights are lessons that the West learned from Africans. First, they debated for centuries to determine whether Africans were human or property the way they debated whether women were property or human. Enslaved Africans in Haiti answered affirmatively to teach the Europeans that we are human, all too human. Soon after wards and with the support of African men like Frederick Douglas and Du Bois, women also won the recognition that they are fully human too.
>
> Fanon teaches us that Europeans are human rights frauds to the extent that they were never tired of talking about human rights but abominate human beings everywhere they found them. The invasion of Libya has nothing to do with humanitarianism except in the sense of vegetarianism.
>
> Biko
>
> --- On Tue, 6/28/11, kenneth harrow<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
>
>> From: kenneth harrow<harrow@msu.edu>
>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Imperiled Revolutions
>> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
>> Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 4:11 PM
>> hi gloria
>> i agree that the absence of moral authority makes the
>> rhetorical reasons for invading sound hollow. they mostly
>> are hollow.
>> i couldn't begin to examine the moral authority of an
>> invading force to judge the validity of the invasion.
>> i want to turn it around and claim that nations always act
>> on their own national interest. if a leader were not to do
>> so, he or she would be booted out.
>> so the question for me becomes, given that france and the
>> u.s. and the u.k. are acting in libya for their own national
>> interest, is the intervention itself something that i am
>> happy is happening. and i mostly feel that ghaddafi should
>> not have been allowed to quash the movements against his
>> regime by the use of force.
>> i wish there were a way we could lend support to the
>> uprisings in syria and bahrein and yemen, the democracy
>> movement in morocco, even in algeria. i find these movements
>> enormously inspiring.
>> i am skeptical that support for these movements will
>> "install democracy." i am opposed to a model of
>> african/arab/latin american peoples sitting around waiting
>> for outsiders to install things into them.
>> on the other hand, on both sides, that of the invaders and
>> the invaded, there are complicated mixed motives for action.
>> sometimes it might be a simple landgrab, but often the
>> contradictions between rhetoric and actions point to mixed
>> motives.
>> i've only recently come to see this, that despite the
>> oppression of colonialism africans took away from the
>> encounter with the colonialists much that they wanted and
>> were able to use to their advantage, included ideas about
>> liberal human rights, gender rights, and so on. and some of
>> this, maybe most of it, was despite colonial policies. for
>> instance, colonial censorship was very severe, but the ideal
>> of freedom of the press and rights of self-expression
>> couldn't be extinguished, and they carry through today with
>> journalists in africa some of the very bravest people on
>> earth. in country after country that i follow, i see
>> journalists on the firing line, and willing to risk jail or
>> their lives. why is that?
>> we in the west talk about freedom of the press. there is
>> much we could criticize about murdoch's press as biased and
>> worthless trash; but that ideal of a free press, especially
>> in countries like cameroon and senegal, is lived at a much
>> much higher level than i've ever seen in the u.s.
>> basta
>> thanks for your response and thoughts
>> ken
>> (by the way, to justify my comment about women's
>> rights being something african women took to their
>> advantage, i would offer the novels of nwapa, emecheta,
>> mariama ba....the older women authors who set the stage for
>> african women's writing, as testament to my claim. they
>> themselves wrote about their experiences in schools when
>> they were young that gave them a spirit of freedom. add
>> aidoo to that list.
>> another great example is wangrin by hampate ba, but that is
>> another story)
>> On 6/28/11 7:06 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:
>>> Ken, this time around I am merely the messenger, not
>> the author,
>>> although I note your comments.
>>>
>>> Incidentally I disagree with your view that an
>> invading power should not at least
>>> have some semblance of moral authority and some
>> 'locus standi'. Without that
>>> its justification for invasion sounds hollow and it
>> joins the league of blatant hypocrites.
>>> To say that you, as a power, are invading to
>> install democracy whilst
>>> your own government is undemocratic is weird. What do
>> you think?
>>> Dr. Gloria Emeagwali
>>> www.africahistory.net
>>> www.esnips.com/web/GloriaEmeagwali
>>> emeagwali@ccsu.edu
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
>> [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com]
>> On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
>>> Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 5:51 AM
>>> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
>>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Imperiled
>> Revolutions
>>> the binary postulated here is too neat. "Islam" is
>> better written
>>> "Islams." there are strong divisions in most countries
>> in the middle
>>> east, i believe, concerning more conservative versus
>> more liberal
>>> understandings of islam.
>>> i think one could also argue that liberal secularism
>> is also the product
>>> of a relatively small segment of most societies around
>> the world, with
>>> differences. in the u.s. conservatives run against
>> "secular humanism,"
>>> and have managed to demonize it, for example. and the
>> split here in
>>> france is clearly along similar left-right divisions
>> over liberal
>>> secularism.
>>> ken
>>>
>>> On 6/26/11 4:15 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
>> wrote:
>>>> Islam is embraced by the vast majority of the
>> Middle East. The idea of a liberal secular republic is the
>> vision of the bourgeoisie, professional elements among the
>> middle strata, and the more organized and skilled sections
>> of the working class. There is little doubt that the mosque
>> provided an institutional foundation for opposition to
>> secular authoritarian leaders – the Church took on a
>> similar role in Eastern Europe under communism – and it
>> makes sense that organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood
>> should have a jump start on political organization in the
>> post-revolutionary society.
>>> --
>>> kenneth w. harrow
>>> distinguished professor of english
>>> michigan state university
>>> department of english
>>> east lansing, mi 48824-1036
>>> ph. 517 803 8839
>>> harrow@msu.edu
>>>
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed
>> to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin
>> Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
>>> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>>> For previous archives,
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>> -- kenneth w. harrow
>> distinguished professor of english
>> michigan state university
>> department of english
>> east lansing, mi 48824-1036
>> ph. 517 803 8839
>> harrow@msu.edu
>>
>> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to
>> the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola,
>> University of Texas at Austin.
>> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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--
kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu
--
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