This Web Log is devoted to simple but deep readings of the subtle and not so subtle messages and to the interpretation of the silences that are strategically delivered through the mass media. Other readers are welcome to agree or disagree or even offer new readings of other relevant texts for the promotion of mass literacy and mutual understanding.
Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the Kite perch. Egbe belu Ugo belu.
Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu (outlawed by Azikiwe in the 1950s) on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.
The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans just as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?
Another Guyanese writer, Karen King-Aribisala, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans.
Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism.
Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..
The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery even though they did benefit directly and indirectly from the national wealth created by slave labor. It was poor whites who were the crew of the slave ships, who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going, and it is poor whites who join the KKK and the police to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege without knowing that they too pay the price for white supremacy since injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, according to Martin Luther King Jr. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.
Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa.
With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo who rose from 'slavery' to become king over the community of his master to show that it was not really slavery and whose name was actually, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976 under the dictatorship of Obasanjo, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.
Biko Agozino NB: The following opinion editorial in response to this blog post may interest some:
“The lice of poor performance in government -
poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of
duty, condonation of misdeed - if not outright encouragement of it, lack of
progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management
of internal political dynamics and widening inequality - are very much with us
today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying
poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’.” – Obasanjo
The press release by
General Olusegun Obasanjo concerning the state of Nigeria is full of evasions
and half-truths. It is not ‘lice’ that make the lousy ‘fingers’ of Obasanjo and his
fellow genocidists ‘not to be dry of “blood”. Their fingers are dripping with
fresh blood because the killings have continued unabated since the launch of
the genocide against the Igbo who wisely voted massively against the Buhari regime that Obasanjo helped to impose.
For full disclosure,
Obasanjo is expected to admit his complicity in the ongoing genocide and offer
unconditional apologies to the Igbo in particular. He should join all
well-meaning people to demand for atonement in the form of reparations. Obasanjo
should admit that the gruesome killings by security forces, terrorists and herdsmen
that he lamented follow the pattern of the genocide against innocent Igbomasses. Unless Nigerians admit and make atonement for this foundational
genocide, the culture of genocidal violence will continue to wet the fingers of
genocidist rulers with ‘blood’, according to the laws of karma.
However, despite all
his human limitations and with all his involvement in crimes against humanity,
Obasanjo remains exceptional for being the first head of state in Nigeria to
hand over power to an elected successor and he did so twice though he has been
accused of imposing flawed successors. He is also the first head of state to
appoint more women to offices in his administration although some suspect that
some of those women may wear the #MeToo pin against him.
He was able to
settle the dispute with Cameroon over Bakassi without plunging Nigeria into a
wasteful war with our African neighbors, though he could have better planned the resettlement of the Nigerians expelled from there or negotiated the admission of Cameroon to the opoen borders of ECOWAS. Similarly, Obasanjo had a magical way
of resolving some political crises in other African states by, for example,
persuading militarists to yield power back to civilians just as he persuaded
Charles Taylor to step down in Liberia, though some suspect that he bargained corruptly
with bags of public funds.
Despite the massive
corruption in his administration, Obasanjo was and remains the only head of
state to establish a special economic and financial crimes commission, EFCC,
with which a sitting Inspector General of Police from his own ethnic group was
convicted of corruption and jailed and some governors from his own party were
indicted, though the EFCC under him allegedly went after mainly his perceived
political opponents.
It is exceptional
that apart from Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Obasanjo is the only Nigerian head of
state to publish books even if they were allegedly ghost-written for him by his
research assistants; nothing stops other politicians from appointing their own
research assistants. He is the only Nigerian head of state to initiate a
presidential library even if the funding involved massive corruption by
governors who donated public funds, according to Gani Fawehinmi. Obasanjo remains the only Nigerian head of
state, with the exception of General Yakubu Gowon whose arranged Ph.D. yielded no publication so far, to recognize his own intellectual limitations and return to school to pursue an advanced degree.
The call by Obasanjo
for a Coalition of Nigerians is too little too late since he also recognized how crucial it is for Nigeria to be involved in the leadership of Africa. The coalition-building
should involve all other states in Africa towards the United States of Africa
that the first president of the country, Azikiwe, called for in 1959 and which
Nkrumah and others echoed. With almost all Nigerians demanding the
restructuration of the country, focusing exclusively on the internal colonial
boundaries of Nigeria is unsatisfactory.
As Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
and Chinua Achebe remind us, the genocidal culture that was initiated against
the Igbo in Nigeria has since spread throughout post-colonial Africa. Moreover,
the African masses have transgressed the porous colonial boundaries in search
of their daily livelihood in spite of heightened insecurities and genocidal
threats. We need to recognize this reality and urgently build the Peoples
Republic of Africa to guarantee the freedom of our people and collectively protect
the masses against the imposed genocidist states ruled with blood-stained
fingers across Africa.
Professor Biko Agozino - keynote address to the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence Symposium 2016
The following blog contains a video - a keynote speech by Professor Biko Agozino (Virginia Tech) at the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence symposium Decolonising Criminal Justice: Indigenous Perspectives on Social Harm, held at the University of Wollongong 24-25 November 2016.
The title of the presentation is: The Withering Away of the Law: An Indigenous Perspective on the Decolonisation of the Criminal Justice System and Criminology.
The declaration (or ‘proclamation’, according to the Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Buratai) by the DHQ of the Nigerian Army that the
‘Independent’ People of Biafra is a 'militant terrorist organization' and the staging of
war against IPOB supporters and their leaders amount to an apparent coup
attempt. It is ‘unconstitutional and unlawful’ as the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, stated; it is an extra-judicial overreach of the sort condemned by Amnesty International in 2016. It is
not the DHQ that declares war even under a military government. That is the
prerogative of the legislative body that makes the law defining what is terrorism and it is up to the courts to follow the due process to determine if any group can be declared terrorist subject to appeals by the group. Nigerian courts ruled in March 2017 that IPOB is not an illegal organization. The executive arm of
government has the power to deploy the military to quell an insurrection under Section 217 of
the constitution. But the proclamation of the right to self-determination by
the masses all over the country, not only in the relatively non-violent Southeast that is
singled out for Operation Python Dance II, is not insurrectional unless
accompanied by violence. No army is entitled to unilaterally declare as
terrorists nor to proscribe, unarmed citizens who are calling for a plebiscite to decide their
future relative to imposed colonial boundaries. It is fascistic to attempt to subject citizens to
acts of war and threats to wipe them out for exercising free speech or even for
throwing stones at military vehicles that tried to 'crush' them as directed by the president in a public speech after his return from over 100 days sick leave in London.
Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo who won the case that deleted sedition from the Nigerian criminal code in 1983 has consistently warned that the Nigerian
ruling classes are playing an ‘end-game’ that he called ‘terminus’ because they
operate ‘cimilicy’ through the empowerment of civilianized military officers
and militarized civilian politicians to perpetuate unjust political structures
and thereby provoke national disintegration. Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has called for dialogue with leaders of the Southeast to remedy the
marginalization of the region instead of adopting the unlawful act of deploying
the military against peaceful civil disobedience, contrary to constitutional
case law precedents and contrary to the adoption of dialogue and amnesty by ex-PresidentUmaru Yar’adua in response to even more militant crises in the past.
Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo also recently cautioned against another war in
the Southeast and called for dialogue just like former military president,
Ibrahim Babangida, given their leading roles in the genocidal war alongside the
incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari.
Nigeria is not a Zoo republic, contrary to the unexamined
njakiri or joke by Nnamdi Kanu and his cantankerous IPOB followers. A zoo is
one of the most orderly spaces that human beings structured and continue to
restructure to accommodate new specimens, to save endangered species, and to
add new attractions. No zoo will allow pythons to dance in triumph over the
fee-paying public that have gathered for edutainment about the animal republic
or kingdom. If a python escapes from its enclosure as was the case in Harry Porter where little Harry used his psychic powers to free it from a glass cage,
the very shy python would slither away into hiding to avoid being caught and
beheaded by the zoo keepers or by ordinary moguls. Zoo animals have never
declared war against zoo visitors without being put down like the chimpanzee
that dragged a child like a doll in a US zoo.
Far from being like a zoo, Nigeria is remarkably zooless
because the zoo keepers have since starved the zoo animals to death while probably
stealing the meat and food that they were supposed to feed to the captive
animals. When the big or even tiny beasts died of hunger, the greedy zoo keepers
most likely butchered them and shared the meat among themselves to see what
lion, reptile or elephant meat tastes like. When the zoo was emptied of
specimens, the politicians swooped and scrambled for the real estate which they
cornered for themselves and their families after selling a big chunk to
companies with huge kick-backs for themselves.
Nigeria is more like a jungle where might is right and where
life is nasty, brutish and short, as Thomas Hobbes would put in Leviathan. The exception is that the
jungle is often better than Naija because the jungle animals never have access
to weapons of mass destruction with which to kill millions of their own species
and or starve them to death while bragging that starvation is a legitimate
weapon of war. Jungle animals rarely kill another animal that they would not
eat as food but Naija cultists kill and humiliate one another for money
medicine, intimidation, or for fun. Jungle animals never issue quit notices nor
circulate hate songs nor wage sectarian religious wars. Of course, Nigeria
claims to be more civilized than the jungle because they actually have a written
constitution, universities, elections, motor cars, mansions and airplanes, they
dress fashionably, have many billionaires and they are very religious. But for
all of that, Naija is more like a jungle than a zoo and so, maybe, the name should
be changed to Naijungle.
Nigeria has cultism enshrined in Schedule 7 of the constitution with reference to the oaths of office that elected officials, judges
and political appointees are required to take. They swear or affirm their
loyalty to Nigeria and commit themselves to upholding the principles in
schedule 5 regarding the code of conduct for public office holders. They also
promise to perform their functions ‘without fear or favour, affection or
ill-will’. They ask God to help them to perform their official duties. If
Nigeria is not a jungle, then the cultist Schedule 7 should have been amended by
now to remind elected officials that they are expected to perform their duties
with fear for the wrath of the masses if not for the punishment of God; in
favour of the long-suffering people and not just to the benefit of their
families and cronies; with affection for the innocent masses, not without
affection; and with ill-will to the enemies of the people such as poverty,
diseases and illiteracy. Do Nigerians even know that this schedule 7 in the
constitution sounds like cultism? How can you require elected representatives
to swear that they will govern the people without affection? That is a devilish
oath crafted with the good intentions of making public officials objective and
impartial but it is flawed like the paved road that leads straight to hell.
IPOB erred by threatening to boycott elections in Anambra andthe rest of the Southeast. The referendum that IPOB is calling for could come
in the form of elections through which the people of the Southeast can elect
representatives who speak for them rather than against them. IPOB supporters should brave the electoral process and
campaign for a party or candidates of their choice. If their supporters turn
out to vote in support of their preferred candidates, they may elect officials
that will advocate for them and help to negotiate the ‘unnegotiable’ towards
the resolution of the crisis of legitimacy facing the country. If they lose or after
being elected the officials sell out and turn against the people, they could be
recalled or impeached.
After the federal government declared war on the people
of the Southeast for proclaiming their rights non-violently, human rights
attorneys should bring writs for crimes against humanity to the international
courts of justice, for adjudication and for reparations.
The people of the
Southeast have suffered unwarranted genocide in the hands of Nigeria. Never
again, to echo the press release of Ambassador Bianca Ojukwu. Instead, offer
the masses the choice to erase the colonial boundaries and join their African
brothers and sisters to build the United States of Africa and terminate the
genocidist state structures imposed by colonialism across Africa.
Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.
I doubt the authenticity of the
song circulating online that calls for genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria.
To say that I doubt the authenticity does not mean that it should not be taken
seriously, otherwise why bother commenting? Even fake news and fake songs can
have devastating consequences if gullible people swallow the propaganda and act
it out. Correct me if I am wrong but I think that Africans should not believe
everything they hear on the internet. We should engage in more critical
thinking.
I doubt if Hausa/Fulani warlords would authorize a
genocidal war song and rely on women to sing it for the men to act upon.
The Hausa/Fulani are very patriarchal in their culture and although they have
had warrior queens like Queen Amina of Zaria and the Boko Haram used women as
suicide bombers, it is very unlikely that they would use the voices of women to
declare war. Women may ululate to celebrate victory by their men but it is
unauthentic for women to be the ones calling for the rape and genocide of Igbo
women, children and men by Hausa/Fulani men.
I doubt the authenticity of
the song also because the accent is not a native Hausa speaker accent.
Although I do not speak Hausa (Ba na ji Awusa), the pronunciation of the
genocidist term Nyamiri in the song as Nyamuri is an indication that the singers
were not native speakers but agents provocateur trying to egg the Hausa/Fulani
youth into a genocidal frenzy against the Igbo who have never done them any
wrong, contrary to genocidist propaganda that the Igbo killed northern leaders in
the past when the Igbo did no such thing.
Western Nigerian officers (including some Western Igbo) led
the first bloody coup in the country to free their leader, Awolowo, from prison
and impose him as the Prime Minister. They later blamed it on Eastern officers
who actually foiled the coup. Then Western Nigerian and Middle Belt Christian officers
led the genocidal war against the Christian Easterners and blamed it on the Muslim
Northerners to ignite an endless religious war but the Igbo have managed to
avoid buying this trap. Yet the hatred of the Igbo remains the major thing that
unites all other Nigerians, according
to Achebe.
The authenticity of the anti-Igbo
song is also raised by the fact that the song made an exception for the
Yoruba, calling for them to be spared in the genocide against the Igbo. Yet it
will not be easy to tell who is Igbo and who is Yoruba in the absence of tribal
marks that are no longer common among the Yoruba. When the rain falls, it will
not fall on one man’s house top.
I doubt the authenticity of the
song furthermore because the beat is not the traditional Hausa beat with traditional
instruments. Rather it is a computerized disco beat that is actually danceable
and I doubt that genocidists would prefer to use disco beats to issue
genocidist calls even if their target audience is the Hip-Hop loving generation
of today. Dem go de Pose,
is what Baba Fryo called such a pretense.
I call on all Africans to disavow songs of hatred and
proclaim the fact that the Igbo are not ‘a curse to Nigeria’ but a blessing to
Africa. All Nigerians should reject genocidist propaganda and add their voices
to the defense of those who are targeted by haters, no matter their ethnic
groups. Choose roses than rape, choose Ubuntu than Ubulani, urges the people’s
poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli.
Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana
Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.
I
was invited by editors to respond to WolfgangStreeck’s synthesis of Marxist analysis of Bonapartism with Weberian Status
Group pluralism. Although this response was not selected for publication due to
a high volume of responses, the publishers offered to pay me for my time and I
asked them to donate it to an NGO that works to prevent mass starvation. Below
is my response to the essay:
Du Bois and Azikiwe
The
essay by Streeck provided an intriguing perspective on the emergence of
politicians that he characterized as ‘Trumpists’. However, his critical essay
is in need of more thorough conceptual clarifications to address some theoretical
inadequacies and empirical untenabilities that threaten the validity of his
analysis and the policy efficacy of the implications.
The
author uncritically presented a rehash of Marx and Weber to suggest a hegemonic
crisis characterized by the ‘death of the center-left’ that created a void to
be filled with ‘class, status and party’ in a US supposedly dichotomized
between the cities in apparent resentful polar opposition against the
hinterlands. From this he concluded that the governmentality of Trumpism is
potentially ungovernable and predicted that Trump may be forced to resign
before the end of his term.
Streeck
nearly ruined his essay from the start with the cyborg premise that ‘strange
personalities’ can be identified by the atavistic stigmata of ‘extravagant
dress, inflated rhetoric, and show of sexual power’ – gangster rap stereotypes
that Trump evidently lacks given that his corporate suit is far from being extravagant,
his rhetoric is monosyllabic, and he engaged Marco Rubio in size-of-hand
envy.
The
joke that the US had lost every foreign war since the defeat in Vietnam risks
becoming an iatrogenic war-mongering capable of goading the most powerful
military in the world (as if more excuses are needed) into the search for a
face-saving winnable war.
Instead
of jeering at Americans that they have 11 million illegal immigrants despite
their ‘elaborate immigration policies’, Streeck should have asked what fortress
Europe could learn from American pragmatism regarding the inevitability of
immigration and the need to pursue increased diversity while providing a path
to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reforms.
On
Bonarpatism, Streeck invoked The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
by Marx to remind us that Trump is not the first figure to come to power and
seek to rule as an absolute monarch to the disadvantage of the masses of
peasants who supported Bonaparte simply because they liked his ideas. Streeck
neglected to inform the readers that Marx did not intend this concrete
historical example to be overgeneralized for he counted the instances of
Bonapartism on two fingers of one hand. The concrete example was used by Marx
to show that sometimes, the infrastructural mode of production is less of a
determinant of historic outcomes than the superstructural ideology of his
much-abused architectural metaphor.
Of
course, Trump is no emperor and even if he wanted to rule the US the way that
Bonaparte ruled France, Trump has to get past the Congress with anxious eyes on
the 2018 Mid Term elections, past the courts that block his CEO style of
orders, past the critical press that reveal scoops to force sacks from the
government, and past the energized electorate ready to call his bluff from one
ill-advised Executive Order to another dead-on-arrival attempt to replace
Obamacare with Donaldon’tcare.
Streeck repeated the Orwellian fact that Trump ‘won’ the election but failed to
add that he actually lost the popular votes by nearly three million.
If
Streeck had looked beyond German Sociology in his search for a suitable
theoretical framework for the US, he could have stumbled on the theories of Thatcherism
and Authoritarian
Populism by Stuart
Hall or Intersectionality
by Kimberley Crenshaw as a more suitable paradigm for the analysis of the
politics of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation
in societies structured in dominance.
Another
major weakness in the essay is the uncritical adoption of Weberian Status Group
theory to explain the election of Donald Trump despite the fact that every
status group was split between the two candidates. The error in Weberian
pluralism is that it tends to underestimate the enormous power that is held by
the military-industrial ruling elites as C.W.
Mills demonstrated in The Power Elite.
The
pitfalls of nationalist sociological preferences may have marred the essay
beyond redemption when Streeck asserted that ‘Trumps seem to emerge easily in
countries with a colonial past –‘. He conveniently failed to add Germany to the
list of imperialist countries despite the savage plunder by imperialist Germany
in Africa, according to Du
Bois, Azikiwe,
Nkrumah,
Fanon, Rodney
and Cesaire.
Nazism emerged from this track record as the logical conclusion to the Weberian
Enlightenment longing for rational modernization without compassion in the
administrative quest for domination, according to Zygmunt
Bauman.
Streeck
erred by concluding that only groups that wanted to use the bathrooms that
corresponded with their gender identity were interested in bathroom birther
laws. On the contrary, many Americans opposed prejudiced laws that picked on other
groups because history teaches that such authoritarianism eventually escalated
violence in society to the detriment of all. When they came for the Jews, many
said nothing because they were not Jews, then, finally …
Dr. Agozino is an intellectual activist credited with launching the decolonization paradigm in criminology with his books, Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, and Counter-Colonial Criminology
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