Let me assure you, I am capable of tittle-tattle but I don't want to get into any tittle-tattle with anyone, with reference to Professor Harrow the human being who you rubber stamp as "almost an African" and who you thusly accuse:
"You say you're being misread, but what's the possibility that all your interlocutors are misreading you?"
All? You can count me out.
What do you want? That he should be "brutally frank" like Dr. Chika A. Onyeani?
Many years ago, I was happy to learn from Rabbi Sacks, about the dignity of difference.
In this diversity (or is it uniformity) of voices, comprehension, you can count me out. I am not misreading anything. I read nuance and a caution that is aware beyond the "cutting" of the foreskin, where the confluence of history and tradition meet. I understand, learn, respect, appreciate, empathise, sympathise with the complexity of his cautious and nuanced self-expression, even if on this issue you would like us to a be uniform and en masse , that we all be shrill in our condemnation of all forms of FGM in Africa in Asia, in everywhere. And what if some African God had decreed FGM?
I intuit that I am not a lone voice saying this on behalf of myself only. Only three other people that I would have liked to see in some crisp discussion are absent in this thread: the late W.H. Auden, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Torbjörn Tännsjö. The latter enfant terrible and atimes radical iconoclast blowing against the popular wind, I requested to go public with a DN article on FGM - public instead of being buried as a footnote or a "hot link" under a mountain of some academic tomes...
Please feel free to ignore this
On Sunday, 2 November 2014 03:21:25 UTC+1, MEOc...@gmail.com wrote:
Ken,...My intention is not to silence you. Far from it. In fact I want you to speak more about African issues, only more candidly. That is what I expect from my white progressive interlocutors. By the way, I could just as well accuse you of trying to blackmail me into a different kind of silence, into not calling you out for what I and other Africans perceive to be your habit of making excuses and supplying caveats, qualifiers, nuances, and irrelevant contexts for African problems and vices--vices and problems that you'd be up in arms--figuratively--fighting in your own society. I find this attitude annoying and condescending. It is, as I said, a form of avuncular racism. It is not always pleasant even though it is unintended, benign, and well-intentioned.The pattern is predictable. If one mentions and condemns the crimes of an African ruler in strong uncomplicated terms, I can count on you to try to put those crimes in context or to try and blame colonialism or neocolonialism for them. For me and many Africans there are situations in which such an instinctive critique of colonialism falls flat and is inadequate for explaining the state of things in Africa. By the way, I go to Africa almost every year and sometimes multiple times a year, talking to a broad range of people. You'd be surprised by the extent to which invoking this anti-colonial critique as an alibi for contemporary African problems has lost relevance on the ground, at how little purchase this rhetoric has among Africans nowadays. Even I myself have been shocked by the reception that this excuse of colonialism and neocolonialism gets among my African interlocutors.When Africans mess up or continue to practice a procedure that clearly offends every tenet of decency, I expect an ally of Africa like yourself to call a spade a spade and say give blame where it is due. After all, we Africans resident in the States or in Africa routinely criticize the foibles of both America and its leaders. If one points to vices being perpetrated by certain Africans, I can predict with a high degree of accuracy, and in fact I have never been wrong, that Ken will come and disrupt the outrage being expressed by pointing to similar vices in America. This tendency to construct equivalences, to complicate African vices and bad practices is often very disappointing, especially coming from a staunch friend of Africa like yourself. True friends, I was taught, tell each other truths and do not flatter or mitigate/minimize each other's deficits. Yet that is what you seem to do consistently.When "FGM" was broached, you predictably took that same tack, throwing around alibis, justifications, and linguistic tropes of trivialization like "small cutting," "symbolic cutting," "rites of passage," and other literary devices of attenuation. This is how folks read your interventions on this topic. You say you're being misread, but what's the possibility that all your interlocutors are misreading you? And the more you've sought to clarify your position, the more alibis and excuses you've come up with for the practice, even while saying that you oppose it. This kind of equivocation when it comes to African matters is not uncommon among Western progressives, who cannot bring themselves to speak candidly about Africa lest they be misunderstood as condemning the continent or drawing from some hegemonic Western scripts. But with you, I don't think such a risk exists; you're almost an African and your record of advocating for Africa on the scholar and activist front forecloses such misunderstanding. Which is why your tentativeness and equivocation sometimes baffle me.So, yes, maybe me and some other folks are reading your current interventions in a larger context of your history on this list, in their intertextual universe. But who can blame us, when you're fond of driving us crazy with this tendency to protect the image of Africa and Africans and to worry more about Western/neocolonial denigration or victimization of Africans than Africans themselves do. That is the classic avuncular humanitarian racism that I speak of, an aspect of which also infantilizes Africans by assuming that Africans cannot discern and select strategically from what Western neo-imperial actors have on offer.I am not saying that this attitude is on par with the white conservative and neoliberal attitude of telling Africa what to do and how to live, and of seeking to remake Africa in the West's image. No, I am not saying that at all. But, quite frankly, for me--and I can only speak for myself--the avuncular protectionist attitude of white progressives is equally offensive. We are all interconnected, in a globalizing world, and our fates are entwined, so we're all invested in these matters, which is why Africans do not shy away from criticizing and calling out Euro-American vices and crimes. Why not return the gesture and trust Africans to take it in the chin and appreciate it like one does an honest critical commentary from a friend?I think there is a balance somewhere--between the haughty, racist dictation of Westerners on the Right and in the neoliberal camp and the avuncular, annoying tentativeness of Western progressives. I have white American friends and interlocutors, progressives, who have been able to strike this balance. We discuss candidly about Africa's problems and I love it. We freely criticize problems in both America and Africa. And they don't condescend to me or my compatriots by trying to make excuses for African/Nigerian failures and problems. I know it is not your intention, but you often come across as making light of African calamities.This is not a white versus black problem. This past summer, while I was in Oxford for research I was invited to a talk by an Americanist colleague who was spending the year there. There, I met this young, brilliant African American Rhodes Scholar and our discussion quickly turned to Boko Haram and the Chibok girls. At the time, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about foreign (read: Western) assistance to help free the girls. He asked me what I thought about that. I looked him straight in the face and told him that I was in support of any kind of help from America, Britain, or any other Western country to help free the girls. Shocked by my answer, he immediately jumped on my comments, spouting the familiar critiques of Western interventions, colonialism, Western agenda, etc. I told him that I didn't care if the US moved Fort Bragg and Africom headquarters to Nigeria if that would lead to freeing of the girls. It was a small price to pay for the girl's freedom, I told him. I would not let my concern about US imperialism blind me to the superior concern about the girls. Dumbfounded, he quietly moved on.I believe in truth telling and honest critique. I have an Iranian Muslim friend who is one of my favorite people in the world. He is free to criticize African problems and vices to me, and I am free to point out what I see as the problems, foibles, and bad practices in Iran, in the larger Middle East, and in the larger Muslim world. Neither of us is defensive. We critique what needs to be critiqued as an internal issue and we point out the external, imperial dimensions of problems that have those elements. I am not one, for instance, to shy away from, equivocate on, or relativize the widespread practice of honor killings in some Muslim societies or the proliferation of so-called apostasy laws in the Muslim world, which in effect codifies religious intolerance and takes away freedom of religion. No one can tell me that that is is "their" culture and thus should be left alone, or that I as an honorary Westerner cannot tell Muslims that that is a despicable law incompatible with the ecumenical imperatives of our world.Anyway, I am just rambling now, but I've gone to this length to let you know that there is a method to my madness, a context to some of my more strident critique of your position on the "FGM" issue. I am not asking you to change your ideology. It is too late now :). Besides, one of the things I admire in you is your ideological consistency, which ironically is the thing that makes you take the predictable positions on African matters that irritate the heck out of me. You're a great interlocutor any day, able to debate and to educate. But boy, sometimes you can make one so mad with what you say or imply in your sophisticated analysis on African issues, especially in situations when one is looking for moral clarity.On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 5:56 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:hi moses
i feel you are somewhat twisting my position. when i said i don't take "traditional" beliefs as overriding other considerations, but rather that they have to be taken into consideration, you read that as meaning something else. i don't know how i could make that clearer since you cite my statement.
if you vehemently disagree with that point, then i guess we are in strong disagreement.
i hate disagreeing, but what can i do? ok, i still think you can't go to a community with a bulldozer and ride them and their beliefs into the ground. you need to talk.
the senegalese women's group i heard about returned for 3-4-5 years to villages where the elders initially refused them entry. they persisted. with time, they were allowed to speak to the women in the village; eventually changes started to come.
the circumcisers were not thrown into prison, but the community began to embrace change. had an american ngo gone in, nothing would have changed; had the police gone it, it would have continued in secret. with the women talking to the women in the community, it was possible to effect change.
my examples: i read about the dogon in the usual texts, back in the day, and male and female circumcision were described in depth. griaule, dieterlein, the usual suspects. i have read here and there, heard here and there, about the need for initiation to entail entry into the adults. that doesn't make it a good rite: kourouma describes it in some detail in Suns of Independence, but it still is described as a path to becoming ready for marriage.
i believe the notion that it entails controlling sexuality is more recent, and has been driven by muslim readings of the rite. i'm not going to research it, sorry. maybe i'm wrong; but i think that since your youth it has been described that way, and that older descriptions focus less on controlling sexual drives than preparing to be an adult.
if i'm wrong, maybe some anthropologist who has worked on this issue can come in here.
lastly, i am not infantilizing anybody in taking these positions. if it were the case, then it seems to me that anything i say concerning africa, any views i hold and express to an african audience becames infantilizing. why is that? am i not allowed to hold positions and voice them without being accused of talking down to africans?
it is really hard for you to accept this, i know, but i don't imagine myself as the white savior when i express my views in african circles. to be accused of that is to be placed in a position where i am being silenced. most whites don't like that, and refuse to take a chance of speaking up. i won't do it. i'll risk being maligned before i'll not speak on an issue, especially dealing with africa because, in fact, i am more at home in addressing these issues than anything else.
ken
On 10/31/14, 5:47 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
Ken,
I started hearing about "FGM" being a practice designed to control female sexuality since I was a kid, way before I had any access to Euro-American modernist scripts. This is common knowledge in many parts of Nigeria, which I'm familiar with. It was never about rites of passage only. And Ayo's example proves the point that this was more than about rites of passage. The father of the woman in the story saw through the rites of passage facade and expressed this understanding to his daughter.
but i am saying the beliefs of people have to be taken into consideration. when i state that, you seem to hear me saying that they override other considerations. i didn't say that.
Yes, and this is one of the places we disagree. For me, a consideration of beliefs is important but not important enough to allow this heinous practice to be inflicted on children, scarring many of them for life or even exposing them to fatal risks. You seem to venerate a consideration of culture, of beliefs, and traditions, rendering this consideration a factor at par with or superior to the imperative of protecting these young girls from this dehumanizing practice. I vehemently disagree with your position, but at least we understand each other here.
you want me to document my claim that these practices concern rites of passage, and not other considerations. well, ayo's response concerning the warri state that point, and i think it is very widespread. anyway, that would take me more time than i'm willing to give to this debate. i read it enough, here and there, to remember it. if, however, you want to claim it is now being used to repress women's sexuality, i'd agree that it has become increasingly so that people use that reasoning. i doubt very much that was true in the past; in fact, i'd bet it was never really the case until the modern period. now that logic is used universally in islamic circles, and has become a dominant rationale for the procedure. but times change.
I don't know what you mean by "in the past." I grew up exposed to this rationale for "FGM." Since I'm not that old, perhaps your "in the past" does not include when I was growing up. Care to cite any sources that locate a different justificatory etymology in some distant African past?
but you seem to think there is no risk involved of u.s. thinking or practices as being dominant or hegemonic, and i do.
I knowledge the risk--there is risk in everything we do or don't even do. However, my position is that Africans are not children. They are smart enough to recognize that Western actors in Africa have their own agenda that could be harmful and can sift through the advocacy and interventions appropriately. More crucially, my point is that 1) it should be up to Africans to discern useful Western interventions and assistance from agenda-laden and potential counterproductive or harmful ones; and 2) that it is not the job of Western liberals and progressives to protect Africans from the risks and dangers of neo-imperialist and hegemonic practices and interventions. This attitude infantilizes Africans. I admit that in many cases African leaders have not done a great of job of insulating their people from the harmful effects and aspects of Western interventions and "assistance," but that is squarely an African problem, a blame borne by Africans, and thus it does not warrant the paranoid anti-colonial but condescending attitude of lecturing Africans on the dangers that Western anti-FGM NGOs and other Western activisms pose to them.
As a final comment here, let me say that your last post clearly delineates for me our irreconcilable differences on this issue. You said you have no issue with "symbolic cutting" of the labia or what you call "making a mark on the labia" for ritual/symbolic purpose. I do have a huge issue with ANY form of cutting or marking of the labia, clitoris, or any other part of the female anatomy for symbolic or whatever purpose. Here, too, we can agree to disagree.
Your posit is becoming a lot clearer and with that clarity comes a better understanding of the differences in how we see the issue. Hey, we even agree on one thing: that Euro-American modernist epistemology and ways of seeing and doing color how Westerners view and name African practices, hence their naming of African female circumcision FGM.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 2:22 PM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:
hi moses
the case of amnesty is more complicated than what you wrote. but i didn't express myself about it to state it was different from others. i think there is, again, gamut of ngos that work with little or no african input into their thinking and are very american or euro-centered in their workings. amnesty had been organized with london as the base from which all researchers and campaigners for the international part of the organization worked. they would go to africa on research missions for a determined period of time, and return to london, write up their reports, and initiate the campaigns. the lawyer and administration were in london. they probably still are, but the campaigners and researchers now have been relocated to various sites located on the continents for which they work. that shift was monumental, and many people left the organization over it.
i have my own criticisms of amnesty, one of which had been this centering of the international org in london; i am glad for the change, but it is, again, not a simple issue. in general i favor african over foreign agencies whenever possible; it doesn't help senegalese children to see Italo- on the ambulances that run through the city, reinforcing the notion that senegal can't produce its own emergency medical services. i don't oppose aid, but i can see the negative ramifications.
you want me to acknowledge the agency of africans like yourself and john in opposing fgm. i never questioned that; african people are divided on the issue, and i've been saying that my position is that i'd prefer outsiders to support african institutions and people in determining the issue. when you express your outrage over it, it might be for many different reasons. i believe when my students do so, it is inseparable from the way they see africa, and it's clear in the discourse they use, basically in seeing african, africa, african ways in general, as barbarous and inferior. that discourse has a history. maybe we all are somewhat enmeshed in it; but i would want my students to be aware of the historical, colonial, imperial history that gave that discourse its epistemology. i didn't say you were driven by that discourse, although maybe it is true that many africans still live by a notion of modernity that is fundamentally grounded in dominant western epistemes with the usual history. we are all caught up in discourses, and inhabit them at times uneasily. i put "fgm" in scare-quotes because i believe it is tendentious and still largely centered in european-grounded sensibilities. that said, i must share in those sensibilities because i am also largely repelled by excision and infibulation.
when it comes to symbolic cutting, i am not repelled by it. sorry, i don't see any reasons to get excited about it. clean knives? sure. when the people of casamance were circumcising boys with the the same razor, sharing the blood of one boy to another, the state came down against it because of aids. there was resistance on the ground because what bound the boys was being taken away. given the threat of aids, however, i think the traditional resistance couldn't be sustained. i note that senegal has a lower rate of aids than the u.s.
i tried, in my response, to suggest we regard these practices relatively. i did state that i favored external intervention in extreme cases, like genocide or slavery. i never stated that the symbolic reasoning for practices trumped other considerations. so why should i defend a position i didn't take? the logic you are using to counter my position is forced. i am not suggesting functionalist anthropological reasons trump others; but i am saying the beliefs of people have to be taken into consideration. when i state that, you seem to hear me saying that they override other considerations. i didn't say that.
you want me to document my claim that these practices concern rites of passage, and not other considerations. well, ayo's response concerning the warri state that point, and i think it is very widespread. anyway, that would take me more time than i'm willing to give to this debate. i read it enough, here and there, to remember it. if, however, you want to claim it is now being used to repress women's sexuality, i'd agree that it has become increasingly so that people use that reasoning. i doubt very much that was true in the past; in fact, i'd bet it was never really the case until the modern period. now that logic is used universally in islamic circles, and has become a dominant rationale for the procedure. but times change.
my last point, moses, is that you seem to want me to impute western, imperialist thinking to africans who oppose the practice. i didn't say or think that. i fully support african people and organizations that work to end it, and i don't think of them as servants to imperial thinking. however, and here is where we might disagree, i feel that american legislative practices and attitudes towards africa are generally condescending, neo-colonialist, and degrading--with some few exceptions. insisting that africans behave as the u.s. congress dictates is a real and present danger; it is manifest in the africom policies and various forms of epistemic violence that continue on levels where popular opinion is being solicited. when it comes to the real everyday relations, things change, and collaboration becomes possible. but you seem to think there is no risk involved of u.s. thinking or practices as being dominant or hegemonic, and i do.
ken
On 10/31/14, 2:07 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
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