A man's got the right to muse, abi?
Brilliant.
Nothing less than brilliant.
Poetic licence? Why not?
Oba + Oga= Ogba, the Doyen - with a book about him with the captivating title, "The Black Intellectual Renaissance: Toyin Falola and African Studies" going to press on June 1st 2015)
Not just African, but Black, an even wider category....yeah, the Last poets moaned about Being under attack for just being black...
So there's a Black Intellectual Renaissance going on right under our noses and some of us don't even know it! For us non-specialists, it's something to look forward to, since I guess it takes one to know one, a historian to know a historian, a lover of poetry to understand poetry and a student of philosophy to assess philosophy. As for me, before joining this forum I had only read three books on African history by people I had actually met : Michael Crowder's The Story of Nigeria, Richard Greenfield's Ethiopia : A New Political history, Akintola Wyse's The Krio of Sierra Leone- An Interpretive History...and I had better squeeze him in too, Eric William's Capitalism and slavery because even though I can't really say that I ever met him, he did turn up to address us at school one morning assembly, was awe-inspiring and made an indelible impression that's still fresh...
One of the questions the book will answer will be the impact of Professor Falola's work/s on African universities and on the African Diaspora outside of the English speaking world, since most of his books are in English, although we must not limit his good works to only book works...
Before Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop, there were institutions such as Sankoré Madrasah, contemporaneous with Spain's first university, the University of Salamanca , one of Europe's oldest universities. Sweden's first University the University of Uppsala kicked off in 1477 and Christopher Columbus only discovered America a couple of years later. Many years after Columbus arrived on those shores there was what's known as The Harlem Renaissance .
The point of reference here is still the Renaissance , the great European events stretching over three centuries and in some quarters said to have been kicked off by the Chinese the guys who discovered gunpowder in the 9th century - long before Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. There's always some point of reference to some greatness that happened earlier - so Wole Soyinka is sometimes referred to as Nigeria's or Africa's William Shakespeare ( at least they have the same initials W.S.)
Gil Scott- Heron sometime referred to as the father of rap wanted to know, so who is the grandmother?
I don't think that the next major point of reference is going to be the enlightenment since there are many signs that the next point of reference is most likely to be the reformation with particular reference to al-Islam ...
Almost everywhere in the world the big question is what is going on?
In the midst of this Black intellectual renaissance, in Nigeria for instance we read that Night Is Arriving In Nigeria, and no smoke without fire, on the African bush media we hear that Goodluck Jonathan's frequent pilgrimages to the Holy Land is in part political : to win the Christian vote in e.g. the Mid Belt. There's also all manner of scandals about the new political patronage, about people being awarded oil blocks as a political tool, as part of the election hookery and crookery for obtaining compliance from the unwilling who for a few dollars more are made willing and able to fall in line of support for the vipers that be.
Nigeria is making headlines everywhere, even here
Nigeria is so so important. If Nigeria rises Africa rises, and if Nigeria disintegrates, the fate that many people forecast, should Goodluck Jonathan win the next presidential election, this is bound to affect the rest of Africa, especially West Africa...
What's goin' on? In which dark corner is all the optimism hiding? Is it the epoch of
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"?
We are now at a loss when we hear some of the shakers saying that there's no democratic future in sight for the country:
"Nigerians deserve an opposition that is qualitatively better than the status quo" is checkmated by the chorus line that "We have no opposition party in Nigeria. None"
Somebody please say it ain't so, somebody please light the torch of hope...
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment