For Oga BJ in Admiration

On A Soyinka Prize In ‘Illiteracy’, By Biko Agozino

by Premium Times  July 14, 2018 Reading Time: 11 mins read

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I will admit to a ‘strategic misreading’ that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial.

On July 13, 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honoured him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marveling about the ‘Author’s Note’ that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman. Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of their play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts would misread the play. He took the unusual authoritarian step of stipulating how the play should be interpreted but the critics appear not to notice and have continued to misread the play, in my own humble opinion. Soyinka leaves clues that would guide readers to decode his original intention in writing the play but most literary critics miss the point and some accuse me of being the mis-reader.

The very first sentence in the Author’s Note may have led many critics astray by stating that the play is based on real historical “events which took place in Oyo”, which the author defines as “an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. This is misleading in a number of ways that literary critics should have been able to understand. To say that the events took place in 1946 would be to localise the time and space of the dramatic events, whereas in the world of theatre, events do not take place exclusively in the setting but also on every stage where the play is produced. Soyinka expected that literary theorists would understand that the playscript is not simply an archival document or ethnographic report but the work of original creation, even when based on real events. The play was not expected to be read as the verbatim report of a tragic case that took place once upon a time. This is true of all works of creative writing that are supposed to be inventive, no matter how much resemblance there may be between fiction and reality. In fact, many writers include a disclaimer that any resemblances to real events are unintentional. As a matter of fact, the same can be said about reality genres that are full of inventions too. Soyinka clearly states in the first paragraph of his Author’s Note that he made “changes” in the narrative “in matters of detail, sequence and of course characterisation.”

He also informs the illiterate critics that he deliberately set the play back a few years “while the war was still on, for minor reasons of dramaturgy.” Here, Soyinka is guiding the would-be producer away from a simplistic historical interpretation of the play as being only relevant to the case of 1946, given that dramaturgy grants artistic license that defies the laws of historical specificity. In addition, Soyinka may have misled the interpreters of the play by saying that Oyo was an “ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria.” Here he could be challenged by historians who may point out that Oyo was an ancient Yoruba Empire and not simply a city and that by 1946, it was no longer simply a Yoruba city but a multicultural one. Moreover, nothing ‘of Nigeria’ can be said to be ancient because Nigeria itself is a modernist invention by colonisers. The hint about the Nigerian setting of the play should have encouraged the critics to understand that the play is not only about a Yoruba tragedy but about a Nigerian tragedy. The reference to “while the war was still on” should have massaged the memory of the critics to remind them that the play was published only five years after a tragic genocidal war in Nigeria in which Yoruba elites played a leading aggressive role, along with other ethnic elites in Nigeria. This play, in my lay opinion, is better understood as part of the soul-searching by Soyinka after he was released from solitary confinement for opposing the genocidal war against the Igbo. Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?

Also, Soyinka indicates that those who were interested only in the factual account of the case of 1946 should go and read it in the British National Archives in Kew. He also points out that those who want to read a more exact historical reenactment of the case should consult the “fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo.” In other words, Death and the King’s Horseman is not that kind of historical re-enactment nor is it the kind of ‘misbegotten’ German television film about the case. The play was a more urgent intervention while Soyinka was in exile following the end of the war and his release from solitary confinement for having the audacity to oppose tyranny. Unlike his other plays, he did not wait for the play to be produced before he published it. I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.

I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, “Season of Anomy”, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide.

In the third paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka declares that the “bane of themes of this genre” is that once the text appears, ‘they acquire the facile tag of “clash of cultures”’. He rejected such a label as “prejudicial” in the sense that it is prone to “frequent misapplication” and also because the label “presupposes a potential equality in every given situation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised ‘on the actual soil of the latter’”. Soyinka went on to award “the overseas prize in illiteracy and mental conditioning” to the writer of the blurb of the American edition of his novel, Season of Anomy, for ‘unblushingly’ stating that the novel is about the “clash between old values and new ways, between western methods and African traditions”. Soyinka explains that it is due to “this kind of perverse mentality” that he was forced to warn future producers (and critics) of the play to avoid “a sadly familiar reductionist tendency” and instead attempt to capture “the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence.” Experts on the work of Soyinka are baffled by this injunction and wonder openly what he was banging on about? What is Soyinka trying to hide, asked Anthony Kwame Appiah? He was trying to reveal something, in my own opinion.

To repeat, I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. In that novel, he mocked the archeologists for poking around in search of fossilised bones while fresh blood flowed like river Niger in the country and they did not seem to be bothered. He also challenged the sociologists who came with ‘erudite irrelevances’ about marriage and divorce but refused to join him in opposing a genocidal war. The novel depicts the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as a phrase-monger who failed to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rallied in support of the genocidal military dictatorship, rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war. To suggest that the novel was about the clash of cultures was a strategy to condition the mentality of Nigerian intellectuals towards the acceptance of the propaganda that the Igbo who led the struggle for decolonisation were primitive tribalists, perhaps because they had no chiefs, while the ethnic groups that ganged up against them were more civilised because they were monarchical, according to the ideologues of colonial domination, such as the Oxford colonial anthropologist, Margery Perham who advised the military dictators to impose chiefs on the radically democratic Igbo in order to control them better. Walter Rodney also observed that to call the genocide against the Igbo a tribal war would be to call Shell BP an African tribe (along with the Labour Party government of the UK and the Soviet Union that generously supplied the weapons of mass destruction). Ikenna Nzimiro argued that the Marxists in Biafra were engaged in class struggles while the Marxist in Nigeria were engaged in national defencism. 

The ‘threnodic essence’ of the play refers to funeral songs in Greek tragedies and I believe that Soyinka was inviting the producers of the play to imagine a national mourning for the 3.1 million killed in Biafra that the country has refused to mourn. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo had been calling for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be recognised by the Nigerian government as part of the atonement.

In the final paragraph of the Author’s Note, Soyinka observes that an alternative structuralist interpretation of the play is to see it as a cruel joke on the British colonial District Officer. He quickly dismisses such a reading as distasteful and adds that he deliberately avoided writing dialogue or scenes that would support such a misinterpretation. He dictates that “No attempt should be made in production to suggest it’. This sounds like an angry response to critics who choose to misread his works for ideological reasons while ignoring the concrete conditions that his works address. 

A prominent Marxist literary theorist that I admire, Biodun Jeyifo, who is an expert on the work of Soyinka, was invited by the BBC to write about any work of literature that he saw as being representative of global culture. He chose to write beautifully about Death and the King’s Horseman as an anti-colonial play that tries to subvert the use of the Queen’s English by creating a ‘future’ tradition of the Anglophone that is more figurative than the English language. He invoked the work of Marxist Cultural Studies by Raymond Williams (but without mentioning the more relevant anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist work by Stuart Hall) to suggest that the other Englishes around the world serve to subvert the domination of the world by standard English. 

I pointed out that Jeyifo's interpretation is too superficial for a Marxist because the ‘thredonic essence’ of the play is not to show that Africans can speak English better than the English. I suggested that a Cultural Studies reading of the play would not have focused exclusively on the beautiful writing or language of the play but would have tried to see the challenge to monarchism and oppressive traditions in the play. Jeyifo told me privately that I should go and read the play again because it is not against the monarchy or against ritual suicide but simply against the colonial domination of African cultures. I admitted that I could be accused of misreading the play but I called it a strategic misreading and wondered if it is possible for an expert on the work of Soyinka to misread it? Soyinka seems to think so and that is the whole point of his detailed telling off of the experts in his Author’s Note.

I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Contrary to the claim that Death and the King’s Horseman is only an anti-colonial play, Soyinka concludes his Author’s Note by stating that “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.” To him, the central ‘confrontation’ or conflict that he tried to resolve in the play was ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it played out in the world of “the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passages which links all: transition.” Soyinka was puzzling about the metaphysics of the Yoruba worldview that made it possible for the best educated characters in the play to be the ones who cheered most vociferously for Elesin to abide by the tradition that expected him to kill himself in honour of a dead king. Similarly, Soyinka was wondering why the best educated Yoruba were the cheer-leaders of the genocide against the Igbo. 

Soyinka advised producers to try and capture this tragedy by using music to represent the macabre dance to the “music from the abyss” by the intellectuals who danced while millions were being slaughtered in Biafra. In his Talakawa column, Jeyifo once wrote that while blood was flowing in Biafra, (1967-1970) he led his secret Pyrates fraternity, that Soyinka founded as a student at the University of Ibadan, in chanting, 'Give us this day, give us this day, our daily manya' (wine in Igbo). Were the elites drunk on power during the genocide? The play symbolizes this with the 'Not I bird' and the hunter who consumed many gallons of manya before trying to kill the innocent Not I bird.

I am not an expert in dramaturgy but I love the work of Soyinka. I cited his essay on Neo-Tarzanism in my criticism of the film, Black Panther, which I called an example of neo-Tarzanism. Following the serialisation of the criticism, I was invited by Assumpta Oturu to the KPFK public radio in Los Angeles to discuss the film with an Ethiopian publisher and an African American director of the Pan African Film Festival. During the discussion, the Ethiopian said that we should not condemn the presence of monarchies in Africa because there were popular emperors such as Mansa Musa and Haile Selessie who were admired by Africans and by the African diaspora. The director of the Pan African Film Festival questioned my reference to Soyinka because he saw Death and the King’s Horseman as an indication that Soyinka was a monarchist who supported even the tradition that the horseman should commit suicide to honour the dead king. 

As Killmonger asked derisively in the film, I asked, “This is your king?” Why must African brothers be expected to fight to the death to determine who should be the next king when we can just hold elections to select our leaders with term limits? I stated that Soyinka used that play and almost every play of his to undermine the institution of the monarchy and call for democracy, which he is on record as admiring in Igbo culture. He tried to spare the life of the horseman in the play and his other tragedies – Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, King Babu; his novels, his poetry and his memoirs all support my interpretation of his anti-monarchical orientation. Since the experts who have studied his work have focused almost exclusively on the structuralism, I propose to offer a post-structuralist or deconstruction radicalisation of his body of work to show that the tragedy of state violence, especially against the Igbo, is at the centre of the conflicts that he has been trying to resolve. Just as the genocidal war was waged without a cease fire for humanitarian interventions, the author coincidentally instructs on page 8 of Death and the King’s Horseman that ‘The play should run without an interval.’

I agree with critics who will charge that I am misreading Soyinka here. If so, I will admit to a strategic misreading that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial. Sociologists approach the work of writers by taking into consideration, the context of the private and the public lives of the authors, whereas literary theorists may concentrate exclusively on the technical, language, or structural aspects of the script as instructed by T.S. Eliot in his foundational essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. 

To reiterate, what I am offering is a sociology of literary interpretation of Soyinka and I am certain that the rebel in him may force him to disagree with my interpretation and award me a national illiteracy prize. I am not contending that all existing interpretations of Soyinka are wrong. I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Biko Agozino is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in Virginia Tech, USA.

Originally published in massliteracy.blogspot.com. Republished as a tribute on the passing of Biodun Jeyifo at the age of 80 years.

Every Month Is Black History Month

 

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Remember contributions every month, not just one

Biko Agozino, guest columnist Feb 4, 2010 Updated Jan 19, 2017  0

Black History Month is every month because there is no month without a significant black history event.

The question of whether one month is enough to celebrate black history is possible today because of the success of activist scholars such as Carter G. Woodson, who started it as the Negro History Week in 1926. He chose the week in February that marks both the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln to honor their contributions to the abolition of slavery. From one week to one month is a leap that some may not have imagined possible when Woodson was starting the series because back then, otherwise learned scholars still believed the misinformation from philosophers such as Hegel that African people made no significant contribution to history.

It is good to know that the Collegiate Times is asking the rhetorical question whether one month is enough to celebrate the immense contributions of Africans to history. Such a question suggests that there is a genuine desire on the part of students to learn more about Africana people and so they wonder whether one month would be adequate to learn all that they need to know. In a sense, the question suggests that the students already hypothesize that every month is Black History Month.

This is a healthy thirst for knowledge that a program such as our Africana Studies Program in the Department of Sociology is here to satisfy with courses on subjects such as Introduction to African American Studies, Introduction to African Studies, African American History, The Black Woman in America, African and Caribbean Literature, The Black Church in America, Race and Social Policy, Special Topics, Africana Contributions to Science and Technology, Africana Research Methods, etc.

Students who take five such courses would qualify for a Minor in Africana studies. Such students could demonstrate diversity contents in the education received here at Tech, making employers look more favorably at them and equipping them with the diversity imagination that they would need to go into business for themselves if they choose.

In other words, people should not treat Black History Month events as rituals to be engaged in once a year but as a reminder of the immense contributions that people of African descent have made and continue to make to world history. A skeptic might wonder why we still need to celebrate a Black History Month if every month is indeed Black History Month. Such skepticism can be answered in two ways.

First, Black History Month is an African-American gift to the world that has since been internationalized following its adoption by Canada and the U.K. This is something for all Americans to be proud of — an innovation of theirs is becoming a truly international phenomenon. Someday, it may become a global event across the entire world.

Second, following the success of Black History Month, other groups have also innovated their specialized history months as opportunities to teach the immense contributions of other racial and ethnic groups to civilization and the enduring problems that others still face in an unequal world.

Such spin-offs serve to reassure people of African descent that the commemoration of history by people who were marginalized for a long time — and whose contributions were denied or denigrated — remains a worthwhile endeavor especially given that racial and gender inequalities still persist in addition to problems of poverty that tend to conceal the huge sacrifices and struggles that the marginalized have gone, and are still going, through.

The cost that the world paid for the ignorant propaganda that black men and black women made no significant contributions to civilization was that such false notions were used to support systems of racial, gender and class exclusion, oppression and exploitation that caused the world so much grief and also denied the world the greater contributions that many gifted people from the Africana community could have made for the betterment of all.

For instance, so many American students today are getting the opportunity to go to universities and better themselves; such opportunities were reserved for the rich until former enslaved Africans started demanding public funds to be spent on public higher education for the befit of all Americans.

According to W.E.B. Du Bois, this demand for land and learning by the Freedmen’s Associations resulted in the public universities that are responsible for the education of a lot of American college students today who could not have afforded the exorbitant costs of private colleges. Although there was a lot of opposition to this demand for publicly funded institutions of higher learning during the era of Black Reconstruction post Civil War, it is now obvious that public higher education does not benefit only black students.

Finally, all human beings descended from Africa and so the celebration of Black History Month should be supported by all as an opportunity to learn more about our common heritage. We all should resolve to adhere to the principles of community by avoiding hateful and harmful conducts that are the result of prejudice and ignorance. We should resolve that we will strive to study Black history as part of world history instead of clinging to the false notion that some people have not made significant contributions to civilization. Black History Month is not just for black people, it is for everyone and it is not just a single month, it is every month.

https://www.collegiatetimes.com/opinion/remember-contributions-every-month-not-just-one/article_c261d7f3-d257-5514-8970-776323b72b59.html 

Imperialism by invitation

By Onwubiko Agozino

 

Imperialism by invitation is a common sign of neocolonialism under phantom bourgeois rulers. Maybe the US will invite Africa to come and strike their domestic terrorists too and Americans will not applaud such a foreign intervention at home no matter what for. 

 

If it is the abundant gold deposits in Northwest Nigeria that Trump is greedy for, he does not need to bomb Nigeria to get some for his family. If he wants to buy oil from the South East and Niger Delta, all he needs to do is place orders at fair market prices. There is no need for gangsterism by invitation, Africans are ready to sell their produce to interested buyers, we will not eat the gold nor drink the oil.

 

There is probably more killing of Christians in the US than in Nigeria and there is definitely more kidnapping in the US than in the whole of Africa. Kidnappings per Country 2025 Data pertaining to the number of people kidnapped around the world, sorted by the country in which the kidnapping took place... 

 

There is no example of the defeat of terrorism through militarism. All the armed conflicts in the world tend to be settled through dialogue around a conference table - Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan, Congo, Sierra Leon, Liberia, Rwanda, Columbia, Northern Ireland, Ukraine, you name it. On the contrary, everywhere the US intervenes militarily, tends to be ruined back to the stone age. 

 

The solution towards silencing the guns, according to AU, is to recognize the militants as legitimate political parties. Let them run for office nonviolently in line with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and if they win a local government area or a state or country, let them govern without corruption to show that they can govern better than the corrupt politicians and war mongers. 

 

Let there be gender parity is all offices; and let there be ranches where the cattle will be kept and food and water brought to them instead of fighting feudal wars over land at a timer that the economy is evolving into an industrial one that depends on knowledge and not on land ownership. Defund the military and invest in education, agriculture, housing, roads, hospitals, technology, sports, arts, and culture.

 

Let the African states that committed genocide against their own citizens apologize to the victimized and offer reparative justice. Let Africans erase the colonial boundaries for a united States of Africa or the Peoples Republic of Africa. Never again should any republic of ants try to swallow the African elephant without facing insecticides. 

 

Donald Trump pardoned those who attacked law makers and law enforcement officers, he has no business bombing fishermen in the Caribbean and African youth - al Shabab - even if some Caribbean or African crooks invited him to do so in order to protect them while they loot the economies. Yes, Africa needs help from friends. What we need to see in Africa are more books and not bombs.

 

Down with imperialism! Down with recolonization! Decolonization Forever! 

 

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

My Daughter Interviewed me for a University Class Project:

 

1. How would you describe palm wine? 

 a. It is the natural sap of the oil palm and raffia palm or date and coconut palms. Mostly oil palm wine is preferred in Igboland. The flower of the palm fruit can be cut open and the sap will sip out to be collected in a calabash, ugbe, up on the tree. The palm wine tapper climbs with a rope, agbu, to drain the calabash and clean the cut on the flower daily for better flow. The collected sap is usually very sweet naturally and starts to ferment immediately in interaction with yeast in the atmosphere. The more it ferments, the more alcoholic it becomes. Some men prefer to keep it overnight to make it even more alcoholic and less sweet. It is usually mixed with water to make it less strong alcoholically. Some wine tappers, Diochi, add sweeteners to the more fermented wine and add more water to make more money but some buyers prefer to buy the fresh sap, akuru, which is more expensive, and then mix it with water to their taste but also to make sure that the water added was not from a polluted source that could cause diarrhea. 

 2. What is it like the first time you had palm wine? 

 a. I was just five or six years old when my parents decided to betroth me to a girl about my age with the expectation that when I grow up, we could get married or she could marry someone else and refund me all the yam and money paid for the bride wealth. They did not ask me to choose a girl or I would have fancied someone else and they did not even tell me the day of the betrothal. I had gone to the distant farms with mother and we worked all day weeding the farm. When we returned, there was a big feast in the compound with lots of palm wine in large basins for people to serve themselves. I joined in drinking and quickly got drunk. The ground started spinning and I went to lie down but I became sick and vomited the wine mixed with food. The next morning my head hurt and I was afraid that I was going to die but Papa laughed and told me to have another drink of wine to clear the hangover. I tried it and it cleared. 

 3. Have you ever made it/seen Simone make it? 

 a. I have never tapped wine. I guess that I never learned how to tie the climbing rope, agbu. I also knew that it was a dangerous job from which many men fall and break their bones or even die. I have seen tappers climb the tree or cut down the tree and carve a big hole in the center to fetch more sap for wine. I participated in fetching from a tree that was cut down once. That kind of wine, ogudu ali, is poor quality and results in headaches for the drinkers compared to nkwu enu or wine from the top of a standing tree. 

 4. Is palm wine consumed mundanely or is it used in any special occasions? 

 a. It is mostly ceremonial for things like family meetings, religious rituals, marriage, funeral, or child naming ceremonies. Friends can also go to a bar and share a drink or go to the market and buy a pot of wine to share right there in the open market. 

 5. Is the drink usually consumed by women or men or all? 

 a. Women may take a sip from a cup offered by men but it is rare to find a woman who is an alcoholic. This makes sense because the women do most of the domestic chores and most of the farm work and trading. Such tasks do not mix easily with drunkenness. The men are often habitual drunks. This was discovered by a British Anthropologist, C.K. Meek, who was asked by the colonizers to write an ‘intelligence report’ to explain why Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929 ‘The Women’s War’ against taxation without representation. He tried to find out if the women were drunk on something but concluded in his book, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, that they were sober and even the men did not drink much daily. 

 6. Are there any legends or stories about palm wine that you heard growing up? 

 a. Amos Tutuola wrote the Palm-wine Drinkard about a rich man who could afford his own personal wine tapper. He needed to consume hundreds of gallons everyday. Then his wine tapper died and he decided to follow the spirit to the land of the dead to make a deal that could bring him back to life. It was a metaphor for men who were power-drunk and who would do anything to bring their poor workers back to life rather than pay the living workers better wages to help them live longer. Wole Soyinka also wrote a poem known as Idanre in which the Yoruba god of war, Ogun, got drunk and massacred his own followers in the battlefield. This is probably a reference to the fact that Nigerian rulers committed genocide against the Igbo in Biafra as if they were drunk with absolute power and were playing god. Chinua Achebe critiqued drunkenness in Things Fall Apart by characterizing the poet and musician, Unoka, as someone not respectable and he died of malnutrition due to laziness, poverty, and drunkenness. That is still the image that Nigerians have of poor artists today though Afrobeat musicians are changing that poor image. University students have the palm wine drinkers club where they crown a chief, beat drums and sing and dance. I was not a member. I joined only the Press Klubb on campus. I just cannot stand monarchies, even if pretend ones. 

 7. When was the last time you had palm wine? 

 a. That was in December 2019 when Biko Jr. visited our hometown, Awgu, with me. One of my cousins who is a wine tapper, supplied us with one gallon every day for which we paid about $4.00 each and friends joined us to share the wine. 

 8. Do you think I would like it? 

a. You may like a sip of it but ladies do not usually drink much for obvious reasons given that men may attack and rape them if they are drunk. When you get married, one of the rituals is when you take a cup of palm wine and sip from it before giving it to your bridegroom to symbolize agreement. These days, people advise that the bride and the groom should pretend to drink from the cup because evil people may have poisoned the cup. 

 9. Do you prefer palm wine over other alcoholic drinks? 

a. I used to prefer palm wine to beer especially when I was an undergraduate student in Calabar. I reasoned that since the unadulterated wine from our village was hard to find, sticking to good palm wine when I could find it would help me to avoid getting drunk so as to concentrate on my studies. When our final results were released, I was with some friends at the bar where a man from Awgu sold only good palm wine in Calabar. A class mate joined us and said that our results had just been released and only one student got First Class Honors. He suspected that it was another class mate but when he told us the registration number of the student, I knew that it was me. I ran to the department to confirm it. I also have a friend who was training to be a catholic priest and he told me that when he became ordained, he would celebrate mass with palm wine rather than red wine. Unfortunately, he was found drunk one day in the seminary and was expelled before his ordination. I no longer enjoy drinking alcohol because it may be contributing to high blood sugar levels in my body. I now drink water and I say that that must be what Jesus was teaching when he turned water into wine – he wanted us to drink water and enjoy it like we enjoy wine because water is the best drink ever. I have a book chapter, ‘Why Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine?’ in a book, Afrikan Wisdom. Thanks for asking, Ada m.

Juneteenth Commemoration in the Interest of All

By Biko Agozino 

 “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

 .  

 Juneteenth is a commemoration (not a celebration) of the last day that enslaved Africans in Texas were informed by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger that they had been emancipated following a proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln more than two years earlier without being told by their enslavers. The Order promised ‘absolute equality of personal rights between former masters and slaves’ who should now relate to one another as ‘employer and hired labor.’ 

The emancipated men were advised to ‘remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages’. They were prohibited from flocking to military posts in search of protection from racist mobs intent on lynching them and they were told that ‘they will not be supported in idleness’ anywhere. The language of the June 1, 1865 General Orders, Number 3, is racist and paternalistic. It assumed that the enslavers will exclusively be the employers of labor while the enslaved will quietly work for wages in the homes owned by the former enslavers. 

They were expected to remain on the plantations and continue working for those who enslaved them. Any hints of the demand for reparations were dismissed as the expectations of being ‘supported in idleness’ even though working hard was known as working like a Negro. There was no expectation that people of African descent would ever move away from the plantations to seek better opportunities elsewhere (there is still no Freedom of Movement in the US constitution), nor that they could become employers of labor in their own rights, nor run for office as leaders. 

 Not surprisingly, Frederick Douglas and many former enslaved people did not celebrate June 1 because they preferred to commemorate January 1, 1863, when the Lincoln emancipation proclamation came into force. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the ‘celebration’ of June 1 came to be preferred by African Americans perhaps because January 1 is too cold a time compared to June 1 but it may not have been the cold weather as such, it could be the contradictory messages in the General Orders, Number 3. 

 The original emancipation proclamation referred narrowly to people who were enslaved in confederate states, leaving hundreds of thousands enslaved in the border states to remain in captivity until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 finally stated that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." In other words, penal slavery or convict labor system remains lawful! . 

In June 2021, the US Senate voted unanimously to recognize Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday but 14 Republican Party members of Congress were the only ones in the House of Representatives to vote against the public holiday. Despite the commemoration of Juneteenth as a public holiday, white supremacy continues to be the order of the day in the criminal justice system, housing, healthcare, voting rights, education, and employment but without a significant effort to offer reparative justice to the descendants of the enslaved. 

 Adiele Afigbo published The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria: 1885-1950 to show that although the British claimed to have abolished slavery in 1834, they had no intention of doing so in Africa where colonialism assumed the role of plantation slavery. It was only after Igbo and Ibibio women rose up to oppose what Walter Rodney termed the ‘double squeeze’ according to which maximum surpluses were extracted from workers and peasants by the colonizers through the fixing of the prices of imported manufactures as well as the prices of exported raw materials and through forced labor that the British started making serious efforts to end what they called ‘domestic slavery’. The women who declared war against colonialism in 1929 were massacred by the British and the Enugu coal miners who demanded a living wage were also massacred in 1949 to show that colonialism was just another name for slavery in Africa.

 The equivalent of Juneteenth in Africa is May 25, also known as Africa Day, the exact date when George Floyd was murdered by police officers to amplify #BlackLivesMatter protests worldwide. Thanks to the awareness raised by the protesters, computer software companies finally began replacing the master/slave codes in their designs with stem/branch alternatives whereas they resisted this change since 2003 when the Los Angeles County contracting office objected to the original language and refused to do business with companies that retained it. The first such master/slave coding was used in South Africa to design a public clock in 1908. 

 About 100 years earlier, Georg Hegel borrowed from the Haitian revolution, the master/slave dialectic to suggest that only masters who fought for freedom deserved equality. He was wrong because a true slave mentality is a revolutionary mentality focused on the plan to escape or to fight and end slavery. Africans should commemorate Emancipation Day too the way African Caribbeans commemorate August 1, Fus Ah August, as Emancipation Day. 

The day should be marked with the reading of relevant history books in schools and in the community and the demand for the ending of modern slavery and for reparative justice to be paid to people of African descent. Instead, many states and the federal government are banning the teaching of African American history, claiming that it is divisive or offensive, as if it is not part of American history. 

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, 540-2317699, agozino@vt.edu

Doctoral Student Mentorship Testimonial

From an Ivy League Doctoral Student who reached out to me for mentorship after reading my work: Dear Professor Onwubiko Agozino, Good morning. Thanks for your prompt response and feedback. I will download, collect, and incorporate these documents, readings, and classic texts into my lists as much as possible, but the outcome depends on the approval of my comprehensive committee. From the last five years, when I started to apply for my higher education, to the present day, I did not get any emails or any feedback on the weekend from any of my white professors, although sometimes I feel it is an emergency or necessary for my project and scholarship application. I am grateful for your prompt, insightful, and impressive feedback on my comprehensive exam preparation. As an orientalist scholar, I feel deep-rooted emotional feelings and responsibilities for my students and fellows outside of my family, neighbourhood and official responsibilities since joining as a lecturer in my department, and I really got this from you from the depths of your heart and you provide feedback as quickly as possible, as I did not think about. In my culture, there are no fixed days or times for communication with my students and fellows. Student needs are prioritized in our cultural norms. We have deep-rooted and lifelong relationships with our students, not as formal professor-student relationships but as guru-fellows. So, it is interesting to mention here from my perspective that our shared feelings, thoughts, and emotional engagements indicate that we are aligned in our goals. We share an ideological convergence and comradeship aimed at transforming the world through scholarship and activism. Our focus is on decolonizing criminology and criminal justice to create a society free from inequality, exploitation, and discrimination, grounded in egalitarian justice. Best wishes to you and your family on Good Friday and Happy Easter. Thanks in advance. Best regards, My response: Dear Fellow-Guru, Glad that you find my suggestions useful. Indian Standard Time or African Time or Colored People's Time is a real thing. An African American once turned up 30mminutes early for a boat trip in Ghana. However, the boat waited an extra two hours to fill up. Then 30 minutes into then, voyage, it stopped for more passengers to be ferried on board. He lost his temper and complained bitterly about the value of time. They laughed and told him that people are more important than time. Thanks for your wise words. Can I share your testimony anonymously? I got the permission to share. Biko

African Americans and Thanksgiving

By Onwubiko Agozino

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God." – Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Thanksgiving was first proclaimed as a national public holiday by Lincoln in 1863 soon after the emancipation proclamation to end slavery and to mobilize over two hundred thousand African Americans to help defend the Union. Was Lincoln thanking the Africans for helping to save the Union? During the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday, I asked colleagues if President Abraham Lincoln was paying tribute to the contributions of people of African descent when he proclaimed the first national holiday for Thanksgiving Day in October 1863. 

    One response came from a Political Science Professor who stated: ‘No; I don't think Lincoln used the Thanksgiving proclamation to celebrate Black folks. But it's an interesting thought! ‘. Another from an Emeritus Professor of History said: ‘I think Lincoln was unifying the nation by superseding state Thanksgiving days with a national one. Virginia had a Thanksgiving in 1619, before the Massachusetts one that figures in the US’s historical myth of Thanksgiving. And there were sporadic, impermanent national Thanksgivings in the years between. 

    Many American Indian Natives do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day, they commemorate the Day of Mourning Genocide. Some African Americans and White liberals do not celebrate it either perhaps because of the commercialization of the holiday with Black Friday shopping frenzy. Do African Americans have any reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving Day even while also mourning the millions that were lost? Yes, everyone has something to be thankful for. We are not going back to the evil old days!

     See the transcripts of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation (epigraphed above) archived by the Obama White House. The proclamation came 9 months after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the freed Black men and women  changed the battle of the civil war fought over slavery. 

    The proclamation started by urging Americans to show some gratitude for the sources of the food they took for granted. What were the sources of the food and comforts of Americans? The land of the indigenous American Indians, their food crops and their animals deserve all the gratitude that Americans could express, American Indian Natives have continued to contest the mythology that their ancestors peacefully surrendered their land to the invaders and taught them how to grow food to save them from starving to death and from engaging in cannibalism to survive. The natives did not surrender their land and vanish, they were subjected to genocide by the ungrateful conquistadores. The US has since recognized the rightful owners of the land by reserving land for some of the surviving native tribes and nations while others still fight for recognition. 

    Women deserve thanksgiving too for they also provided, and prepared the bulk of, the food Americans took for granted. One of the early advocates of a national Thanksgiving holiday was the slavery abolitionist feminist writer, Sarah Hale, who allegedly wanted to recognize it as a whites-only holiday, probably to avoid opposition from white-supremacist men and women who wanted freed Africans to 'go back to where they came from'. The emancipated Africans defiantly stated that they and their descendants were here to stay, come what may, no matter what others say. 

     Lincoln made his historic proclamation at a conjuncture in history when the survival of the Union was in doubt due to the pro-slavery rebellion of the confederate states over the so-called ‘state right’ to expand slavery to the whole of the United States to end the dilemma of hunting for run-away enslaved people in the land of the free. Initially, Lincoln refused to allow people of African descent to join the Union army and stated that if he could keep the nation united without emancipating a single person from enslavement, he was prepared to do so. 

    He also proposed to repatriate the emancipated Africans to a colony island near Haiti. Eventually, he was forced by the circumstances of confederate battle victories to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to weaken the economies of the confederate slave states and he welcomed formerly enslaved Africans to join the union army and help to defeat the confederacy. 

    Nine months later, the bravery of the former enslaved Africans in battle had turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the Union Army and that was the context of the Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Two years later, in 1865, Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address to honor the troops who were wasted in the battlefield towards the end of the war.

"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom." Lincoln, 1863.

At the time of the proclamation, the labor of the enslaved Africans and the poor working class Whites was the main source of the food and industry that Americans took for granted. Lincoln did not make this explicit in his proclamation, of course not. He was saying Graces and giving thanks to ‘Providence’ the way you do even when you know that it was your papa and mama that produced and reproduced the food, goods, and services for your survival. 

     It might be a coincidence rather than a causation that X came before Y, Emancipation before Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in the same year during the Civil War, but there is absolutely no reason why Americans would not give thanks for the sacrifices that people of African descent made to build the nation in chains and defend it since then. 

     Every Day is Thanksgiving Day, let all Americans remember the sufferings of people of African descent in the country, say thanks to Providence for providing their livelihood, offer apologies to the descendants of the enslaved for the crimes against humanity that the country visited on them, and offer them a significant package of reparative justice. 

     The Obama White House, by archiving the transcripts of this proclamation by Lincoln, may have been calling for reflections on the centrality of African Americans in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863. 

    There is no justification for the consensus that erased the African presence from the Thanksgiving narratives by the media, historians, sociologists, and poets. Congress should use every Thanksgiving Day celebration to authorize appropriations for the long overdue Reparations Proclamation and apology to people of African descent for the crimes of hundreds of years of enslavement that built the United States and defended the Union against pro-slavery rebellions.

 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf

Listen to President Joe Biden on 3 December, 2024 at the National Museum of Slavery in Angola as the first US president to visit the country. The US should be encouraged to use their bully pulpit to announce a reparative justice package for people of African descent and invite European states to contribute regarding what Biden called 'the original sin' (it is a crime against humanity and not simply a sin) of the US (and European countries, not the US alone), the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891uu1dqZA