SIR Cornelius:
This is interesting history! Thank you and V-C Aluko for your respective perspectives and elucidations!
You mentioned Brother Malcolm X in passing! Well, in our biography of Malcolm -- MALCOLM X: A BIOGRAPHY (Greenwood Press, 2014) -- as well as our recently-published book, MALCOLM X & AFRICA (Cambria Press, 2106), we have researched and presented several aspects of Malcolm X's very long 1964 stay in Africa, during which he received in East and West Africa several warm welcoming accolades and honors, including the giving to him of the Omowale (Yoruba) name at University of Ibadan. Hopefully, many of our people will delve into the two books, which are deemed by critics to be refreshing departures from publications that either rehash or harp on Malcolm's problems with his Black Muslim brothers and sisters! Of course, my former Ohio Sate University boss (the late Professor Manning Marable) did his own overkill with his 594-page tome, MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION (Viking 2011); his massive book did not sit well with several Malcolm scholars and admirers because of some unnecessary revelations!!
A.B. Assensoh.
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 9:02 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's Quote
V-C Aluko,
Many thanks for elucidating what for me was the mystery of "Whidah" which I had suspected was a code name, an ugly racist pseudonym/ code word for somewhere in "Niggerland"; you know that some racists think that Niger-ia is where Niggers spelt with one ge come from. Spelled with two esses, Gustavus Vassa is available in Swedish translation as Jag, Slaven Gustavus Vassa av Olaudah Equiano ( I the slave Gustavus Vassa by Olaudah Equiano )
"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" ?
Be of good cheer : In 1964, Malcolm X was given the name Omowale when he visited the University of Ibadan
But first of all, to set things right Sir: Like many a Nigerian politician, Gustavus Vasa was greedy for wealth and power - he took a lot of money from the churches etc, but I don't believe there is any justification for anyone labelling him "a racist Swede".
Gustavus Vasa contemporaries in Europe
Gustavus Vasa and his contemporaries in Europe
Which is not to deny that a few centuries later Racism is very much alive, here and that sometimes, you can see it in eyes staring daggers, looking at you and saying with them there eyes, "You are in the wrong country"
Yesterday, I was at the Royal Library between 1400 hrs and 1700hrs checking out Equiano.(BTW, one of my Better Half's first cousins (Margareta), used to be head of that library after some time as the head of the University of Stockholm's library and you may - as we say in Nigeria, " rest assured" that I have read many a doctoral thesis , not least of all about South Africa and every once in awhile, some hot stuff by one Stefan Jonsson
Cut out the satire and we may compare Equiano's real life peregrinations to
Gulliver's Travels. On life's pilgrimage, wherever we may be now, I believe that we are surely in the same boat (planet earth) and hopefully, moving on.
I don't pay attention to whippersnappers behind the curtain. At the same time, in my view, in this people's planet we cannot be talking about a person - not even about Karl Marx who is buried in London or about Jesus of Nazareth who ascended to his Father in heaven or Nnamdi Kanu who ran away to Scotland instead of facing trial by Pontius Pilate and eventual crucifixion, rebirth and resurrection as the Messiah of Biafra - we cannot talk about such flesh and blood and have them say we shall not "personalise" it. It is my fervent hope that some Jahmaican or Nigerian philosopher doesn't start braying that that's some unwarranted invective from somebody, anybody. As Marcus Garvey wrote about injustice
"Lying and stealing is the white man's game;
For rights of God nor man he has no shame
(A practice of his throughout the whole world)
At all, great thunderbolts he has hurled;
He has stolen everywhere-land and sea;
A buccaneer and pirate he must be,
Killing all, as he roams from place to place,
Leaving disease, mongrels-moral disgrace- "
When it comes to the problematics of miscegenation versus segregation we notice that unlike E. W. Blyden the first, Equiano also a product of his times and having only recently escaped the gallows ( lynching ) - is all for the mixing of the races. I guess that Steve Biko also stood for that too. Otherwise , it's his sometimes very cringing tone - the usual tone of the uncle tom, that riles me. Just as the extremely servile tone of Kachikwu's letter to President Buhari - riles me to the extent that I wasn't sure whether or not there was a misspelling in this line from Skytte's book and perhaps you could elucidate that too :
"The Negroes who come from the Ebo tribe in Benin are the weakest and the most disheartened" The slightest hard treatment reduces them to despair and suicide."
This is a slaver's perception but who pray could "the Ebo tribe" be? Surely, not our Brethren from Eastern Nigeria? I know that like the Jews, they are always whining, but "the weakest and the most disheartened" The slightest hard treatment reduces them to despair and suicide." ???
Re- "Equiano must have known that there were powerful people out to discredit him"
In the preface to his book, there's the letter which begins, " An invidious falsehood…. with a view to hurt my character and prevent the sale of my narrative"
I half expected that at the conclusion of the story, unlike Cornelius Adebayo, Brother Equiano returns home, sweet home in Africa, and in the land of the rising sun, he marries an Igbo woman and they live happily ever after…
Better Half ( in Sweden known as " The government" ) has been whining that she wants to use her computer ( we have two computers but only one chair) so I'll vacate the chair and end here…
MVH,
Cornelius
On Thursday, 19 October 2017 10:42:45 UTC+2, Bolaji Aluko wrote:
Cornelius Hammelberg:
I am consuming your contributions voraciously.... You have a way of teasing in information...
By the way I recognize WHIDAH is really the Kingdom of Whydah or Ouida
Please continue our education ... I am intrigued about the extemporaneous nature of claims to Igbo heritage, as well as Obi's wonder about the power of recall of all the fine textural details of his people's indigenous culture by an 8- or 11-year old. Was the adoption of a racist Swede's name the last laugh, what Sherlock Holmes would have exclaimed to Dr Watson "How did we miss that, Watson?"
I ordered two books on all of this today... I like mystery.
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko...
On Wednesday, October 18, 2017, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
"The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America
is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown
violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have
not risen up against their oppressors--in which they would
have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the
democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of
black people has so fervently continued to believe in a
turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die
philosophy! It is a miracle that the American Black people
have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the
centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man's
heaven! The miracle is that the white man's puppet Negro
'leaders,' his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with
degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off
their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black
masses quiet until now." ( from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X ) …
In this our Pan- African forum, here's my last two kobos worth, please permit me to start here:
Gustavus Vasa being the name of the Swedish King popularly credited with being the founder of the nation known as Sweden, it's a good guess that there are many Swedes who are very curious about a slave, a very famous one at that, named after that Swedish King though with a slight difference in spelling, Equiano's rather non-Ogbo name bearing an extra ess to its cling : Gustavus Vassa.
Since Sweden's only possession in the "New World" during the slave-trading era was the tiny island of Saint Barthélemy and for only a very brief period, a major point of curiosity would be, was Equiano from that island and therefore fondly baptised or self-named after one of Sweden's great kings ? The short answer is no. My only knowledge about that former prized possession is a TV documentary I watched recently and a few decades before that, circa 1986 to be exact, reading Göran Skytte's Det kungliga svenska slaveriet ( "The Royal Swedish Slavery") which unlike Equiano's autobiography is unfortunately not yet available in an English translation, but as background to the times in which Equiano lived and some of the White World's prevalent attitudes to Africans in the period and context in which Equiano's biography was written, here are some of the most memorable lines from Skytte's book (my reliable, state of the language translations) :
The title of Chapter 5 is : "The Negro laughs and smiles and would really prefer to be a slave "
"Carlsson's attitude is that he he thinks that the Whites because of their skin colour stand over black people. It is like God given that there is a social order in which the white has unlimited power over the black"
On page 114 :" God's ombudsman and the Swedish Church's representative on St. Barthelemy explains that the Negro is only partly a human being :
"Negern , sådan jag i Västindien haft tillfälle att observera honom är knappt till hälften människa ; resten är apa och tiger"
" The Negro, as I had an opportunity to observe him in the Caribbean, is barely half a person; the rest is monkey and tiger"
"There are some traits of the Negro that show that he is partly a monkey. Laziness. Talkativeness. His craving to dance and play. Addiction to stealing..Lust for animal love and sweet things."
"The tigritude comes in this way.The Negroes swear together in countless conspiracies against the whites They intend to try to eradicate the white people in the most incredibly cruel ways."
"To substantiate this reasoning, Carlsson writes that the negroes are so low that even the animals shun them. If a white person is bathing in the sea he risks being eaten up by a shark. But Negroes can bathe without risk. Ther sharks don't like Negro meat…"
According to Bergius' book which was published in 1819:
"These negroes have different looks and different characters and characteristics depending on where they come from. He writes that he does not see any difference between them when the night is dark. But by the light of day, one sees that they are very different.
The Negroes that come from the tracts that are north and west of Sierra Leone have raised noses, light skin, silky hair and a mild temperament. They consider themselves to be better than the other negroes."
(I am thinking of Wofa Akwasi as I translate the next two paragraphs) :
"The Negroes that come from the Gold Coast have a powerful and unbearable and bold and sometimes cruel mindset.. They have a coal -black skin colour and strong physiques and they often instigate riots/ rebellion." They have given many resounding proofs of their resistance/contempt for torture and death."
"The Negroes that come from Whidah are completely different , the exact opposite.They fear death so much that they are even afraid to say the word ( death) These Negroes are specially useable in agriculture." ( N.B. I don't know how to translate " Whidah" - it's in capital letters, so it must be the name of a place)
"The Negroes who come from the Ebo tribe in Benin are the weakest and the most disheartened" The slightest hard treatment reduces them to despair and suicide."
"The Negroes from the Congo and Angola have ebony shiny skin. They are intelligent and well-behaved and highly valued in the Caribbean."
Generally, he speaks very highly of the young Negro women, " The Negresses shoulders and waists are beautiful …" etc etc etc…
Heartbreaking . "One of the complicated problems on that Swedish island ":
The last paragraph of chapter 5 :
"For example:
"If a White man married with a black or coloured woman - and that woman is a daughter to a slave - it can so happen that through her marriage with a White man, that Black or coloured woman eventually becomes the owner of her own father or mother"
When it comes to the autobiographical of the from- slave-to-liberated African genre, there is the more recent Alex Haley's fictional "Roots".
We're now talking about The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African - "written by himself"...
I must and do admit that perhaps because he is writing in that quaint English style of the state of the English language in his century, Equiano could sound a little like - like Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe - or perhaps what was beginning to then be more in vogue - a noble savage having undergone the experience of "amazing grace " in the new world, now describing - in retrospect , a quaint, exotic, idyllic and Godly Africa, unspoiled by any of the barbarities of Western civilisation - at least that's my impression of the first two chapters. Subject to the same kind of intense ( this time) textual scrutiny and reading along the same lines, the unbelievers may be inclined to even question and want to probe the certainty/ reliability of Edward Blyden 1's claim to Igbo ancestry, perhaps at a time when it was exotic to be of Igbo ancestry? The question that I was about to ask, has just been answered by none other than Obi Nwakanma - and the question was whether or not those two chapters either corroborate the view that everything he says is true making room for the vagaries of recollection playing tricks on someone abducted from home at the age of eleven plus. The other question of course is whether or not contemporary Igbos well acquainted with Igbo culture and history recognise and acknowledge what Equiano remembers or has chosen to narrate in the first two chapters of his autobiography.
Obi Nwakanma's answer : " Because I too, having read Equiano over and over, still marvel at the power of his recall; the significations encoded in the matrix of cultural detail, that could not have been available to anyone else other than one who had first hand experience of that culture"
As has been severally pointed out, at base and for verisimilitude alone, Equiano's story is not really a bildungsroman - be that as it may or may not be...
My other question is which only Equiano can answer : Kidnapped at age eleven, could Equiano have forgotten his Igbo language completely? Tabula rasa? I had completely forgotten Fula/ Fulani but I was barely six years old when I arrived in London and years later could not recognise my mother...
In his accounting, Robin Blackburn states that "Equiano explicitly relied on secondary sources, pleading his need to supplement his own "imperfect" memory of events that occurred when he was 7 or 8 years old. Carretta also finds that Equiano's first visit to England was two years earlier than he recounts in the Narrative, perhaps in an effort to raise his age at capture from 8 to 10."
What then are we to make of these words of Equiano in Chapter two of his story : "In this way I grew up till I was turned to the age of eleven of eleven when the end was put to my happiness in the following manner" ( from which point he proceeds with the narrative of the catastrophe , his abduction... )
Getting kinda long, so here endeth, for just now...
On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 09:11:30 UTC+2, Kenneth Harrow wrote:Here is a good account of the issue, published in a review of caretta's book, in the nation:
The True Story of Equiano
Vincent Carretta's Equiano, the African is the complex narrative of a Carolina slave who bought his freedom, married an English woman and published a memoir on his life as a seafarer and gentleman.
November 2, 2005
In 1999 the readers of Slavery and Abolition, a scholarly historical journal, were startled to learn that according to a respected editor, one of the foundational "slave narratives" might not be all that it purported to be. The text in question was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Vincent Carretta, the diligent editor of a new edition of the work for Penguin Classics, had come to doubt whether Gustavus Vassa, who went by the name Equiano, had really been born in Africa, captured as a boy and transported to the New World, as he claimed in the Narrative. In his Slavery and Abolition article, Carretta explained that his research had led him to believe Equiano had probably been born in South Carolina, and that his account of an African childhood was a vivid piece of imaginative reconstruction, a reconstruction that perfectly suited the needs of an abolitionist movement then principally focused on the evils of the Atlantic slave trade.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano first appeared in London in 1789 and went through nine editions, one of them in New York, over the next six years. The stark account given by Equiano of the horrifying conditions on board the slave ship could be corroborated from many other sources, notably the rueful memoirs of slave trading captains who had come to repent their former profession. But abolitionists and, more recently, historians were pleased to be able to cite someone who was a victim as well as an eyewitness. The first modern edition of the Narrative appeared in 1969, and it was subsequently much reprinted and excerpted. Henry Louis Gates Jr. included it in his collection The Classic Slave Narratives, and filmmakers have based reconstructions on its account.
Carretta, who has written a full-dress biography of Olaudah Equiano, confesses that he "never expected, indeed, never wanted" to debunk his subject's account of his origins. Of course, Carretta–a professor of English at the University of Maryland who has written extensively on slave narratives–still sees extraordinary literary and historical value in Equiano's writings. The man formerly known as Gustavus Vassa was indeed a slave for many years–longer than was previously thought, if Carretta is right. He eventually purchased his own freedom, and his account of an extraordinary series of experiences and adventures can be independently corroborated at many points.
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