Ken:
Nigeria remains a magnet for people in the Sahel. Many more people enter Nigeria than those who leave!
The dream of Tuaregs is to live in Nigeria, just as a young man's dream near Adepoju's house is to live in the US.
One myth is that Africans migrate in large numbers to the West. Nothing can be further from the truth. Internal movement is far greater.
Those in the southern parts of Nigeria have more mouths (to use a popular Nigerian word which is not approved in British English) than those in the north, and they drown others in their representations of reality
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: Monday, April 17, 2023 at 10:33 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can I Be Proud of Nigeria's History and Institutions the Way that Many in the US Are Proud of Theirs?: A Reaction to Watching the US TV Series Designated Survivor
Not to address reasons why a successful academic historian would want to live in the u.s. instead of nigeria, it has been historically the case that people from poorer countries have sought employment in richer countries, period. At times nigeria was that richer country, when ghanaians or niger-ians, or burkinabe or cameroonians sought work there. There are few places in the world where this hasn't been true. Even in the cases of israelis migrating to the u.s.
I have an -inlaw younger man now living in germany, rather than chicago. For periods of my life i lived in france or senegal or cameroon, and in all cases considered living them. Family and job kept me returning to east lansing.
I would not take a hollywood depiction of american greatness seriously for anything. As toyin f remarked, the flaws and abuses that great power states have committed are commensurate with their power and wealth, and the wars, including ukraine today, remind us of that ugly side of humanity, wealth, and power.
The real issue i think, besides this obvious appeal of wealth, is quality of life, and for many life in africa has its human compensations
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2023 9:55:47 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can I Be Proud of Nigeria's History and Institutions the Way that Many in the US Are Proud of Theirs?: A Reaction to Watching the US TV Series Designated Survivor
Not envying you prof. Trying to emulate you instead, without having to migrate to the US.
Not envying the US, either, just aspiring to take from it what is uplifting.
Anyway, the point i was making is ''can we dismiss US self celebration as pure propaganda and mythologising?''
All the points you made against the US are well known but people keep flocking there anyway.
why?
thanks
toyin
On Mon, 17 Apr 2023 at 13:41, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
A proverb that applies:
Don't envy a beautifully dressed woman, ask her for the tailor and buy one for your wife!!
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, April 17, 2023 at 7:30 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can I Be Proud of Nigeria's History and Institutions the Way that Many in the US Are Proud of Theirs?: A Reaction to Watching the US TV Series Designated SurvivorOga TF,
With all due respect, sir, a problem with your response may be summed up as ''how should the possessor of a nine fingered hand respond to discussions of such anomalies?'' adapting a Yoruba proverb Abiodun invokes in Yoruba Art and Language.
Please allow me explicate this delicate point.
Your response to my post about US self celebration of its Presidency, history and institutions in that film, describing it as idealized but significantly factual, wondering if i can be proud of my own country along similar lines, is1. '' Hope you are not proud of how that power and office promoted slavery'' yet, you, who as a historian are better informed than me about that inhumanity, chose to leave the motherland you and I share in that continent that provided the source of the US's dehumanizing trade in slaves across centuries, reverberations of which continue to resonate till today, to spend most of your adult life in that very country that so brutally enslaved our people.
Why?
The answer to that question will help us assess to what degree the Americans' glorification of their Presidency, history and institutions are mythologies of power.
2. ''Hope you are not proud of how that power and office promoted...racism'', yet, after witnessing the recurrent unjustified killings of Black people by police in that very country, after witnessing how one of the most illustrious Black scholars in that nation, Henry Louis Gates Jr, was unfairly targeted at his home because of doubts that the home belonged to him, handcuffed and led off by police since they were not happy with the response to their queries by the unarmed, middle aged man using a walking stick, the Black, but actually half Black, half Caucasian President Barack Obama describing the polices' act as ridiculous but was later compelled to apologize to the police and invite Gates and the Caucasian police officer to lunch at the White House, you did not publicly respond in disgust to what some may see as that show of double standards and make a public protest, to the best of my knowledge, talk less return to Nigeria, where such an anomaly is most unlikely to occur.
You are likely, like other Black members of the US middle class, to have realized that your sterling achievements and social standing would not help much if you did not abide by certain unfair rules, and like one of Gates' Harvard colleagues described himself as doing, made sure that his house ownership papers are always in an easily accessible location near his door so he can show them when required, and like Nigerian immigrant scholar to the US, Sylvester Ogbechie stated on his blog, made sure that his vehicle papers are readily accessible in his car so he could readily provide them when asked by police, and if he needed to produce anything from the car when demanded, he would ask permission first, while keeping his hands visible in full view of the police, all these to alleviate fears or claims that he could be reaching for a gun, rules Black people in particular, it seems, have learnt to follow, since following them could mean the difference between life and death.
In Nigeria, such horrors are much less likely but you have not returned to live in Nigeria but prefer to visit and return to the US.
Why?The answer to that question will help us assess to what degree the Americans' glorification of their Presidency, history and institutions are mythologies of power.
3. ''Hope you are not proud of how that power and office promoted...massive destruction of the world in several locations, the military-industrial complex and the storage of the bomb that can kill you in far-away Lagos!''
Yet, not disgusted with what seems like such an inhuman culture, such bastardization of human possibility, you take advantage of the technological power underpinning those military potencies and initiatives, of the human possibility amplifying construction of social systems of which that military power is one expression, built as it is on the contributions of a globally sourced conglomeration of immigrants, from the German WW2 rocket scientists eventually central to US rocketry after WW2 to Elon Musk from South Africa, you creating your own egalitarian research and publication near global empire within the belly of US cultural and educational culture as part of the globally dominant Western culture and educational, social and technological system.
Why?
Among your most recent publications in the last five years are stringent efforts to foreground non-Western and particularly African agency in the face of Western cultural imperialism, empowered as it has been by Western political, military and economic imperialism, a globally dominant force of which the US is the centre, yet these books are published by Western publishers, mainstream publishers, not rebel, fringe publishers explicitly distancing themselves from those hegemonic orientations, and yet you are likely being rewarded for those publications by the US university you work in, an employment position greatly facilitating those productions.
Is this a contradiction or a creative integration of contraries into a unity?The answers to these questions will help us assess to what degree the Americans' glorification of their Presidency, history and institutions are mythologies of power.
thanks
toyin
On Mon, 17 Apr 2023 at 09:17, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Mythologies of power!
Hope you are not proud of how that power and office promoted slavery, racism, massive destruction of the world in several locations, the military-industrial complex and the storage of the bomb that can kill you in far-away Lagos!
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, April 17, 2023 at 3:10 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can I Be Proud of Nigeria's History and Institutions the Way that Many in the US Are Proud of Theirs?: A Reaction to Watching the US TV Series Designated SurvivorCan I Be Proud of Nigeria's History and Institutions the Way that Many in the US Are Proud of Theirs?
A Reaction to Watching the US TV Series Designated Survivor
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The President in the film, centre, flanked by his aides
Picture by Ben Mark Holzberg in Explore Entertainment
Watching on Netflix the fictional film Designated Survivor, a sheer celebration and idealization of the US Presidency through visual and performative symbolism, plot, characterization and speech projecting the Presidency as a noble institution rooted in the convergence of intimate, heterosexual family values and humanistic personal integrity, radiating outward to pastor the American people and care for the world through personal challenges the President may face, through national and international crisis, at one point I started crying bitterly, asking myself if I could be proud of my own country's history, institutions and values the way that films like this one project those of the US, idealized projections, but demonstrating some truth, and reflecting how many Americans see their country, in my view.
Against the background of the recurrent quotation of words of that most iconic of US Presidents Abraham Lincoln, the pervasive use of images of past US Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others, evoking for those informed about their symbolism, the glories they are associated with, and the recurrent showing of famous paintings dramatizing great moments in US history, I asked myself, are there any Nigerian Presidents or heads of state I can't point to as heroic, whatever their limitations, any events in Nigerian history that I understand as collectively agreed by the nation as great moments?
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