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