Appreciation for Kasala Kamara’s Tribute to African Civilization

By Biko Agozino 

I received a signed copy of A Tribute To African Civilization (Atlanta, Sene Press, 1995) from the author, Kasala Kamara, on 10/11/2006 in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago shortly after sharing a panel with him at the Center for Black Arts and Culture conference with delegates from Nigeria. He had just spoken about the energy sector and later that evening, the Honorable PM, Patrick Manning attended an evening reception where he promised to offer help in the energy sector to Nigeria. I shook hand with him later to commend him for the policy of publicly-funded university education for the citizens. 

Some of the Nigerians came with samples of their produce - roasted groundnuts in plastic bottles but with a dose of sand. One wanted to know how he could export cashew nuts to Trinidad and Tobago. Did they not hear the Prime Minister offer help with energy sector? I asked myself. I had just arrived the country a few months earlier to take up a job as a Professor of Sociology at the University of the West Indies. Brother Kasala must have been impressed with my modest contributions as a chair of the panel in which he presented; for he wrote in the autograph to me: ‘To Brother Onwubiko Agozino Positive Vibrations’ and singed. 

That was very touching for a reggae lover like me who understood what groundings with Rasta mean by positive vibration, popularized by Bob Marley and the Wailers in that iconic song. I purposively went to the Caribbean partly to reconnect with brothers and sisters whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa for four hundred years without any expectations that we would survive and meet again, survivors of the slave raids and survivors of slavery, survivors all. And here was a brother I was meeting for the first time, and he called me, brother. 

 When I read the book, it struck me as an original contribution to knowledge in many different disciplines. Structured into five parts, the book covers in Part I, what is now a consensus among scholars in different disciplines that Africa is the genesis of civilization, science and technology. Such a thesis was argued by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1950s with three successive Ph.D. dissertations before he was reluctantly passed in France. Like Diop, the author maintains that Black Africa built the ancient Egyptian civilization contrary to skepticism by Eurocentric authors. Kasala went beyond Diop’s theory of state building origins in Africa by delving into his own specialization in International Relations, in which he has published several other titles, to highlight the ancient African origin of diplomacy and international law. 

 Part II highlights the contributions of Africa to the development of world spirituality, morality, ethics and wisdom and how the African conception of God is related to other contributions to civilization. Part III profiles personalities like the Pharaoh, Akhenaton, and Imhotep, the first recorded multi-genius in the world who thrived in a civilization that respected the rights of women without slavery as a mode of production, without prisons, and without racism. 

What jumped out at me most, as a criminologist, is Part IV where the author offers a definition of national security based on the welfare of the people and the roles of Africans in the development of humanism, the family and the wider world. I have cited this part of the book in several of my publications because of its alignment with the decolonization paradigm that I am credited as having helped to develop in criminology following my book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation and also in my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. 

In an editorial essay for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies which I edit for the African Criminology and Justice Association, I answered the question: ‘What is Criminology?’ And I stated that it is ‘A Control-Freak Discipline’. I was invited back to The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine to present this paper as a Keynote Address for the International Conference on Penal Abolitionism. I was told by one of the organizers that the police officers attending were eager to challenge me, and I said to them, bring it on. When one lady officer objected that the national safety officers did not like being painted as the bad guys, I responded that the same bosses that pay them also pay us scholars but the difference is that we are hired to apply our critical thinking to the order of things while they have the mandate to impose order. 

The Chief Judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice who chaired the session privately agreed with many of my recommendations. A radio DJ had made a joke earlier about my call for Reparative Justice by using it as the subject of his daily ‘Tings that make me vex’. This time, he interviewed me live on radio about my call on the Prime Minister to legalize marijuana as reported that morning in The Guardian,  and I answered those who called in to say that it was a gate-way drug by asking them to help to take it out of the gate by making it legal. 

 One of the sources that supported my critique of the obsession with controlling others by criminologists is Kasala Kamara. I cited his revelation that in ancient Egypt, it was reported to the Pharaoh that the principality of Damascus was rebelling and demanding their independence from Egypt. The advisers recommended crushing the rebellion militarily to teach a lesson to other would-be rebels but the Pharaoh invited the rebellious prince to dinner instead. 

After liming (feasting and philosophizing) with him in the royal palace, the rebel prince was asked what his people wanted. He answered that they wanted to be free to govern themselves by themselves. The Pharaoh shook his hands and told him to go and tell his people that they were now independent and free to rule themselves as they saw fit. Compare that with the constant waging of wars through invasion, enslavement, colonization, genocide, and exploitation engaged in by the imperialist West for five hundred years at a huge cost in lives to poor Europeans who were used as cannon fodder around the world and also at home where militarized policing gave rise to the BlackLivesMatter movement worldwide.  South Africa massacred poor people protesting the jailing of President Jacob Zuma for alleged 'state capture' while the proven criminals of apartheid land, gold, and diamond theft and mass murder are forgiven to walk free in a deeply corrupt South Africa.

By forgiving the rebels and granting their request for freedom, the rulers of ancient Egypt avoided putting the lives of their own soldiers at harm’s way and avoided creating enemies abroad through the mass killings of the loved ones of others. The wealth that could have been wasted in such wars were instead devoted to education, the development of canals, science, arts, architecture, medicine and philosophy in the longest lasting dynasties ever recorded in history. I was also borrowing indirectly from this book when I Directed and Produced an award-winning documentary on the banning and eventual liberation of Shouters Baptist Faith in Trinidad and Tobago. 

The documentary, ‘Shouters and the Control Freak Empire’ asked criminologists to explain what crimes the Shouters committed that made the colonial administration to proscribe them, arrest, and harass them just for praising God in their own bell-ringing ways. In accordance with the decolonization paradigm, I suggested that the Shouters were right to see themselves as people who were victimized and abused by the imperialist state for their freedom of conscience, a people who resisted non-violently by holding services secretly in the liberation struggle to regain their freedom, making them deserving of reparative justice. It premiered on Gayelle TV and later won the International Best Short Documentary Prize at the Columbia Gorge Film Festival, USA, 2011. 

 As I look back at the book and the author, I now understand better why he is named Kasala Kamara, which literally means in my Igbo language – complain (Kasala) and let it be known (Kamara), appropriate meanings for the rebellious Igbo man who led a rebellion in Guyana, and the common West African name for great teacher from whom he took his second name. However, the name could also be meaningful in other African languages. 

I came to hear from those carrying commerce that he was one of the Sixth Form student activists who supported the 1970s Black Power revolution in the country to end discrimination against people of African descent. On graduation from the St. Augustine campus of UWI in 1975, he became one of the leaders of the National Joint Action Committee and the book emerged from his 30 part radio program series that he narrated in 1988 in his capacity as Director of the Caribbean Institute of Regional Affairs and International Relations in observance of  African Liberation Day and with a commitment to the re-emergence of Africa as a leading world power. I heard that when the activists were rounded up and put on trial, a Nigerian genocidist army officer who led the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra (in which an estimated 3.1 million died in 30 months, 1967-1970) was said to have been seconded from Nigeria to be one of the military judges that tried the activists. 

I heard that he recommended the death penalty as appropriate because that was what he would do in Nigeria to coup plotters. Prime Minister Eric Williams rejected the death penalty and all but forgave the activists while implementing some of their demands to see Africans hired as bank tellers or air hostesses in Trinidad and Tobago, the only country in the world where people of African descent are officially known as Africans. 

 The forgiveness of the unforgivable is common among people of African descent who went through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and internal colonialism without seeking revenge, only reparative justice i9n accordance with the Africana philosophy of forgiveness, compared to Abrahamic traditions that rule out the forgiveness of the unforgivable, according to Derrida. Such apparent forgiveness was not rare in the Caribbean for Fidel Castro was spared after the June 26 Movement failed to capture state power and he, in turn, forgave the captured Bay Of Pigs invaders and sent them back to the US whereas Che was executed after being wounded and taken prisoner. 

Hugo Chavez was forgiven by Venezuela, the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and Chavez forgave the military officers who had briefly overthrown him. Granada has also released from the death row, members of the New Jewel Movement who had been sentenced to death for the killing of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others that prompted the US to invade the country. Mandela abolished the death penalty while the killers of Chris Hani were awaiting trial and possible sentencing to death. He launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear confessions and offer forgiveness, but no offers of reparative justice there. 

 Twenty years after the Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, the July 27, 1990 uprising by Muslimeen activists again rocked the government at the Red Building in Port of Spain. Instead of detaining the leaders without trial or assassinating them as was common practice across the world, the government went to court to try and evict the group from a piece of land that they were occupying without authorization. 

If the government leaders had read this book by Kamara, they would have allowed the Muslimeen to occupy the land and grow their own dasheen or okra and things as they wanted. The government should not be evicting citizens from land where they want to grow food while the same government spends huge resources to import foreign food that the poor people may not be able to afford, or just not wanted by people who want to grow their own. 

 This book was at the back of my mind as a journalist, Nazma Muller, interviewed me for The Express Newspaper on policy options to reduce the mass violence in the beautiful country. I told her that the people were brutalized by history and so it was not surprising that they would be violent.  I suggested that the government could help to reduce the violence by ending the death penalty which brutalizes the conscience of the people, as I argued in a paper written in the country; by ending the war on drugs which escalates violence, by legalizing sex work, abortion, and same sex marriage, the prohibition of which promotes toxic masculinity, and by offering reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans who got nothing at the end of enslavement. The corrupt, brutal, neocolonial regimes in Nigeria have been prone to be overthrown despite the use of the death penalty as a punishment for failed frequent coups. 

 I heard that some preachers preached against me at church after reading the interview but if they had read this book by Kamara, they would have agreed with at least some of my recommendations. Someone reproduced the interview as a booklet with an artist impression of my interview photograph on the cover and with the title, The Big Bad Book, with copies sent to all the banks in the country, just for so. I was informed that a credit company used the article as the cover for their annual report on bad debts. Huh? Eventually, Prime Minister Keith Rowley bowed to reason by accepting the recommendation of the Caricom Cannabis Commission to decriminalize marijuana for medical uses. I hope that the people of Trinidad and Tobago will have the courage to push for full legalization of marijuana to allow poor women and men to grow it and sell it to tourists during carnival and thereby earn legitimate wealth from which they would pay taxes, as I argued in a written submission to the commission. 

I hope that they will have the courage to abolish the death penalty as we recommended (in a joint paper with David Greenberg of New York University) published in the British Journal of Criminology. When the country of The Gambia proposed to execute 37 people at once, this paper was sent to them with the observation that it was the colonial administration that imposed the death penalty that African countries have retained long after the colonizers abolished it as barbaric in the metropole, partly because there is proof that it is not a deterrent. I hope that this was one of the reasons that made the government to suspend the mass execution. Ent (no be so)? 

 In agreement with the final Part V of the book on the present-day riches and potentials of Africa, I invited Kasala Kamara to guest teach my political sociology class for Graduate Students. The students evaluated his teaching to be of very high quality and if I had stayed longer in the country, I would have recommended that he should be hired as a permanent lecturer. Readers can support his work by asking their libraries to order copies for them if they cannot afford it. Students can also use inter-library loan to access the book and they can write to various departments on campus to raise funding to bring the author as a speaker by Zoom or in person. I recommend the book to all levels of readers. 

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Blacksburg, Virginia.

'Uninvited' by Kenyetta A.C. Hinckle

By Biko Agozino

On Sunday, 09/19/16, I heard an artist, Kenyetta Hinckle, open her exhibition on Virginia Tech campus with a talk about her reworking of colonial photographs of topless African women in sexualized poses. She gave them suggestive titles like 'Vendetta', 'Reprisal', 'Witness', 'The Sower' and called the entire series, ‘Uninvited’. These titles remind us of the fact dramatized by Fanon in critique of Freud when he suggested that some women invite rape by fantasizing about it whereas rape is by definition, uninvited or non-consensual, just as there is no such thing as colonization by invitation, despite assumptions that we asked for it. She wondered why people called her little African but scratcher as a child.

Kenyetta Hinckle also exhibited paintings of Tituba, the African Caribbean woman who was accused of being responsible for inducting Salem Massachusetts girls into witchcraft. For some reason, her work was displayed along the ‘Corridor Gallery’ and people kept streaming past during her engaging talk, making it look like a street arts performance.

Her work reminded me of attempts to justify the unjustifiable records of the postcolonial genocidal state. Interestingly, she said that when she was in Nigeria as a visiting professor at the University of Lagos, some of her colleagues told her that the topless photographs came from a time before 'civilization'. I told her how apt that was given that Sigmund Freud saw civilization as a violent exercise in the repression of the instinct for love and death, pleasure and pain. She spoke again to my Africana Philosophy of Nonviolence class on 09/19/2016

When I shared the story of her initial talk on Facebook, an art historian and visual artist challenged my Freudian interpretation as follows: ‘You know, of course, that the Nigerians she spoke to had something entirely different in mind. I hope you also pointed out that they are wrong, and they cannot be wrong and right all at once. As an aside, Biko, have you noticed how the vast majority of younger Nigerians who graduate from Nigerian universities have little grasp of grammar in any language?’ I responded as follows:

‘They are obviously wrong as Cheikh Anta Diop proved long ago with Civilization or Barbarism, with Precolonial Black Africa, and with The African Origin of Civilization. But at the unconscious level, they are also right as Freud would argue. The artist understood that they were suggesting barbarism and she said that she was shocked because as an African American woman, she could be seen in the role of neo-Tarzanism given her effort to cover up the innocence or Dadaism of the women with her African fractal patterns of drawings that looked like thin veils. She also reported that on her trips across Europe, white men were frequently flashing their genitals at her under the assumption that she must be a sex worker and when she complained to her white male professor, he asked what she was wearing as if it was her fault. She said that she was appalled to hear in Nigeria that the police routinely shoot non-violent protesters to death but she was told to hush it because that was the order of things under neocolonialism.

‘Regarding the murder of the English language by Nigerian graduates, I will agree with Martin Luther King Jr. that they can serve even if their grammar is ungrammatical. So like Fela Kuti, Naija musicians, and Chief Zeburudaya, let the creative ones go on adding value with the ginger in the swagger of their grammar. The artist noticed the peculiar grammar of our broken English because everyone kept telling her, 'welcome back', when it was only her first visit. Freud also argued that the repressed keeps returning to futilely challenge the patriarchal authority with infantile dreams of killing the father to marry the mother, trying to repress his own instinct to love and death, and seeking to exploit nature. Fanon said that such Oedipal neurosis was not known in the Caribbean, perhaps because female-headed families were more common, but also maybe because the instinct for imperialism is peculiarly European. Thanks for your usual provocation. You should offer VT an exhibition.’

Then, one of my former students from Trinidad and Tobago and now a Lecturer commented as follows: ‘Oh my how I wish I was at VT right now’. I replied as follows: ‘Thanks, I will report on the discussions for the benefit of your … class. But note that Chief LeRoy Clarke and Shawn Peters, among others, have been offering similar 'pain things' (paintings) about the Caribbean crisis of control-freak societies. I hope that your class is watching them and not only the TV.’

Another Facebook friend also commented saying: ‘Interesting perspectives on "civilization" - I was unaware of Freud's comments on the subject. It reminds me of the day, when I was teaching at Ascension High School in Eleme, Nigeria, that one of my students asked about "civilized" countries, making it clear he felt that European countries were civilized and African ones, including Nigeria, of course, were not. I was not terribly surprised by his comments, but disturbed by them, nonetheless. The other students, (5th formers, I believe they were) obviously agreed with him. I began my rebuttal by pointing out the horrors inflicted on others by such Europeans as Hitler and Stalin, people from two of the countries this student thought were civilized. I said that Nigeria was indeed "civilized," that it contained some of the finest (and civilized - in the most positive use of that word) people in the world, and that we have to be careful not to denigrate countries due to a perceived lack of "civilization" nor feel inferior to countries that had no superiority over any African nation.’

And I responded, saying: ‘Thanks for sharing your critical thinking with your Nigerian students. Dr. Assata Zerai also reported that when she was a visiting professor at the University of Ife, undergraduate students kept telling her that we were wicked sinners until the missionaries came to save us. Freud presented his unusual hypotheses in Civilization and its Discontents and also in Moses and Monotheism. But the hypotheses run through his body of work. He believes that the Id is the wild one bent on gratifying all pleasure instincts. But soon the Ego emerges through socialization to check the selfishness of the Id by teaching the little motherfucker that the mother was not accessible to his Eros. Frustrated, the brothers leave home to found their own families where they repress their own sons while still battling with their despotic father with the childish dream of liberation in the form of patricide. Finally the Superego comes in to regulate the instinct for pleasure by imposing the work ethic that makes people sweat for their living when they would rather avoid all work and simply enjoy erotic pleasure (with the exception of the privileged few such as artists and intellectuals who may truly enjoy their work). The trick is to let people believe that by working, they are simply battling with nature and conquering it in order to exploit it.

Thus civilization is an endless exercise in repression of natural instincts of Eros and Nirvana. Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) subjected Freud to a detailed critique in which he demonstrated that this idea that repression equals civilization runs through Western Philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel before Nietzsche dissented with his queer sense of morality as immorality. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Du Bois, Diop, Nkrumah, Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, Toyo, Achebe, Davis, hooks, Amadiume, Nzegwu, Collins, Ekwe-Ekwe, and Hall are my model critics of Freud because they revealed that what was mistaken as Eros was mainly the profit motive of greedy capitalists who would not hesitate to kill their fathers or sons to maximize profits. Freud speculated that some of my model critics did not really end repression but actually founded repressive regimes that they brazenly called the dictatorship of the proletariat in their efforts to refuse the 'reality principle' that civilization progresses through repression. Marcuse disagreed with this speculation by Freud and insisted that a non-repressive civilization is possible when we allow our imagination to roam free in the arts and sciences without being bogged down by the 'performance principle' that is prone to aggression in the psychology of Freud. I have critiqued Freud elsewhere on his view that Africans, Aboriginal Australians and Maoris were extremely neurotic for their stringent maintenance of incest taboos compared to Europeans who had no qualms about marrying their first cousins. Today, science has proved that those 'natives' that Freud called barbaric in this context knew what they were doing because inbreeding weakens the genetic pool.

During her presentation to my class, Kenyetta introduced the land of Kentifica which she discovered and mapped as the intersection of globalized Africana homeland and Diaspora with its own handmade musical instruments (as is the norm in Africa), with food shared publicly as performance (common in Africa), with colorful hair designs and textiles covered in African fractal patterns (also common in Africa). She said that she resented being called Oyibo (European) in Nigeria and retorted to her seamstress that she spoke the way she did because some of our people sold others into slavery. I intervened to remind the class that one of the books we were reading for the Introduction to African Studies class was How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. That book proved that it was not really a slave trade but a class war in which a few African chiefs collaborated with their European class allies to wage war and capture Africans to be enslaved. The rest of our ancestors fought hard to prevent our beloved from being captured and enslaved and the struggle continued through the middle passage to the plantations. We are all survivors meeting one another against the odds.

About the artist…

http://www.kachstudio.com/

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Hinkle received her MFA in Art & Critical Studies Creative Writing from CalArts and BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Her work and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed Fore at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA and The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire. Hinkle was the youngest artist to participate in the multi-generational biennial Made in LA 2012. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Hinkle was listed on The Huffington Post’s Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know. She is also the recipient of several fellowships and grants including: The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award, The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), and The Jacob K. Javits Full Fellowship for Graduate Study. Hinkle is a recent alumna of the US Fulbright Program in which she conducted research at the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria.