One Hundred Years of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm: Concerning Non-Violence

By Onwubiko Agozino 

 Abstract: 

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness, and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP. And Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers in Colonie Belge - the cover design of my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology. As the African Union yearns for the guns to be silenced across Africa while the insurgencies rage across the wretched continent; and lumpen bourgeois politicians spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans in genocidal proportions, I advance the innovative interpretation that Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm were all adherents of the philosophy of Ubuntu as the non-Western path for the development of democracy in Africa. Both Edwin Madunagu and Joe Slovo have written to support the strategy of social democratic peoples revolutions., rather than wait for the armageddon of armed struggles as the only means necessary. From the perspective of organic intellectuals, books are mightier than bombs!

 Narrative: 

"Contrary to the Malcolm myth, violence was not a major part of Malcolm's program for building revolutionary politics in the West....Malcolm was not advocating violence but completely rejecting nonviolence because of his radical understanding of the real world" - Kehinde Andrews (2025) Nobody Can Give You Freedom: The Political Life of Malcolm X, London, Allen Lane, p. 78.

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba in 1925, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside, lest the 'phantom bourgeoisie' seize control of the new nation and continue the oppressive exploitation of the masses. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP and progressive religious organizations. 

Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers and privileged the call for reparations rather than retaliation. In his Independence Day speech, he stated as follows:

"We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on concord and goodwill." https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm

In his 'Address to Congolese Youth', August, 1960, Lumumba stated clearly:

"Young people who have been inactive and exploited for a long time have now become aware of their role of standard-bearer of the peaceful revolution."

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/youth.htm

And in his Address to the All African Congress in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960 Lumumba emphasized his message of peace as follows:

"We are acutely in need of peace and concord, and our foreign policy is directed towards co-operation, loyalty and friendship among nations. We want to be a force of peaceful progress, a force of conciliation. An independent and united Africa will make a large and positive contribution to world peace. But torn into zones of hostile influence, she will only intensify world antagonism and increase tension." 

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/25.htm

To emphasize the armed struggle today in the neocolonial situation across Africa means to kill fellow Africans with weapons of mass destruction supplied by former colonizers to facilitate the extraction of African mineral wealth. That is why some call it homeycide - the killing of homies! I survived one such genocidal violence in Biafra as a Biafra Baby, 1967-1970, costing 3.1 million lives in 30 months, or 100,000 per month, mainly through the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war', as claimed by Nigerian government officials who were diplomatically and militarily aided by the UK Labour Party government and by the Soviet Union.

When I posted this message to a radical sociology discussion group and to an African discourse group online, I received strong opposition that convinced me that the thesis needs to be tested in an extensive research project for a book monograph. A response quickly followed from a graduate student at a flagship state university in the US, telling me that he was an admirer of all three brothers and therefore could not stomach my revisionism to suggest that they were advocates of nonviolence. He said that my revision of their work to emphasize non-violence could only be true ‘… if one exempts defensive violence (self-defense, overthrow of colonialism and Jim Crow) from "violence." He went on to assert that ‘Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" is a magnificently argued call for killing the colonizer, both mentally and physically.’ He added that Malcolm had no problem with violent self-defense, “By any means necessary”, including violent defense. He credited Lumumba with being a founding member of FRELIMO, “an organization dedicated to armed struggle to achieve Mozambique national independence.” Then he alluded to the claim by Malcolm that only the Black revolution claims to be a non-violent revolution whereas the American, French and Russian revolutions were very bloody. “The perpetrators of these revolutions are considered national and international heroes” he claimed, and added that “Fanon, Malcolm, and Lumumba asserted that Africans in America and in Africa had the same rights as white people.” In conclusion, he stated as follows: “Surely, it alters their contributions to say they were non-violent.” Yet he signed off with the greeting: ‘peace’ before his name. 

Another brother quoted Malcolm, in the African Dialogue Series, from his1963 Message to the Grassroots in Detroit to say:

"There’s nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.!" 

But Malcolm did not take any life (that we know of) in revenge for the lynching of his father, he did not drive anyone crazy the way his mother was institutionalized, he did not burn any home in retaliation for the fire-bombing of his home, and he did not burn any church in retaliation for the 50 bombing explosions between 1947 and 1965, including the killing of three black girls in church in 'Bombingham', Alabama. He said that he loved a white man to the amazement of Manning Marable, but Frederick Douglass also said that he loved that overseer who whipped him for learning to read the Bible. Malcolm apparently forgave his enemies, in my humble opinion, perhaps so that the All Merciful may forgive him his own sins!

 I responded to the brother as follows: I agree with you that self-defense is no offense by any means necessary. I propose to read the Africana classics more strategically. Reading The Wretched of the Earth strategically, I propose to test the hypothesis that Fanon, the psychiatrist, emphasized that the frequency of the violence of the colonizers was causal in relation to the violence of the colonized mainly against their own brothers and sisters; if x then y; if you do not wish to see y, then prevent x. It was the violence of the colonizers that drove Africans nuts and also drove the violent colonizers insane. It is still happening today all over neocolonial Africa and in the inner cities of internal colonies in the Diaspora, just as the colonial violence drove Europeans insane enough to embark on their tribal world wars over the greed for colonies in Africa that killed an estimated 80 million people, despite the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois against imperialism and its reckless greed for resources. 

 Moreover, when Fanon joined the national liberation movement after quitting his impossible job as a colonial psychiatrist, he dedicated himself to diplomacy, intellectual and moral leadership as a theorist and not as a suicide bomber. Same can be said about the rest of us intellectuals who write books rather than throw bombs. Antonio Gramsci concluded that even the bourgeoisie rules by coerced consent mostly (though not without threat of force) whereas when imperialists resort to violence, it is proof that they had lost the hegemonic struggle.

 Brother Malcolm never killed anyone that we know of. When asked if it was true that the Nation of Islam calls for violence as a means for achieving freedom in America, Malcolm X replied that 'we are not a violent group, we are taught to obey the law, but we are also taught that we reserve the right to defend ourselves against violence...we have never bombed white churches' unlike the white supremacist groups, and yet the propaganda of violence is attributed to the Nation of Islam but not to whites, he said.

I propose to analyze his speeches to explain why he answered the provocative question that agents provocateurs may have posed to him, 'By the Ballot or By the Bullet?' By the ballot, he chose even while defending the right to self-defense in a country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the liberal Constitution. 

There is no principle of armed violence in the 10-point program of the Black Panthers. Instead, they emphasized the principle of arming the people with knowledge, according to its former President, Elaine Brown, who gave this retort to a white woman who asked her why the Panthers fetishized the carrying of guns at a conference in the Schomberg Center, New York Public Library - carrying a gun did not make you a revolutionary or police officers will be the biggest revolutionaries, she said. Rather, the Panthers preferred to watch cops to make sure they did not abuse their enormous powers, they organized free breakfast programs for poor students, and organized free medical care for the poor while encouraging people to register to vote. To them, self defense included legal defense in courts, marches, and rallies. Often, the protests of the Panthers were nonviolent until the cops and the FBI started rioting.

 Same thing goes for Lumumba who called on the United Nations to send troops to defend the restoration of independence in the Congo. During the struggle for the restoration of independence, he campaigned against the violence of the colonizers and demanded reparative justice, just like Fanon, without calling for violence as a principle in the struggle to regain independence. 

Both FRELIMO and the ANC started as non-violent organizations before the violence of the colonizers drove them to adopt armed struggles which were suspended to allow for negotiations. Those African states that were forced to adopt the armed struggle as a tactic do not compare more favorably with those that adopted the non-violent positive action of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his mentee, Kwame Nkrumah; though Nkrumah later wrote the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare after being overthrown by the same neocolonial army of occupation that he commanded. 

What the brothers were teaching us is evident today - wherever Africana people are armed, they tend to use the arms to kill one another in genocidal proportions while western arms companies laugh at us all the way to their banks with huge profits. On the other hand, those who have adopted the Ubuntu philosophy or what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable (to which Tutu responded that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu), such as Columbia after the bloody civil war from 1958-2016, or Northern Ireland after the troubles, have reaped greater dividends than those who continued fratricidal violence with western weapons of mass destruction in places like Biafra, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Algeria, Western Saharawi, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Uganda, etc. 

The Abrahamic religions of the Book may claim to be the genesis of non-violence and forgiveness, but Derrida demonstrated that each of them also made exceptions for that which is unforgivable and each holy book is full of violent scenes. Only the Africana tradition, according to him, tends to forgive the unforgivable. Tutu and Tutu retorted that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu. The Igbo symbolize it with Mbari ritual architecture, according to Achebe, Martin Luther King Jr analogized it with the Great World House (preferring a beloved community to chaos, though Africans and modern architects and engineers use the system of African Fractals to integrate chaos into their designs for improved public safety - sometimes it is better to deconstruct the old house and rebuild on a new foundation, according to Ron Eglash), Rasta dub it One Love, and Rwanda calls it Gacaca. Gandhi admitted that he learned the experiments with truth from the warlike Zulu who taught him about non-violent resistance.

 I propose that non-violence, the philosophy that Gandhi claimed that he learned from the warlike Zulu, is one of the greatest contributions of Africans to world civilization. African languages have no word for violence but they all have expressions for peace! Kassala Kamara attributed its origin to classical African civilization when the rulers of Kemet granted independence to the rebellious principality of Damascus rather than seek to crush their rebellion. Maulana Karenga illustrated it with the case of the eloquent peasant who used logic to seek the recovery of his stolen property rather than take up arms against the government officials that robbed him. Chinua Achebe illustrated this with the case of Ezulu, the Chief Priest in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and a hunger strike to resist being forced to become a colonial chief among the democratic Igbo who brag that they know no kings. 

 Even Karl Marx, according to Friedrich Engles' preface to the first English edition of Capital, observed that a non-violent revolution, such as the abolition of slavery, was possible in England, provided that the enslavers did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion as they did in the US. I propose to test the original hypothesis about the centrality of non-violence in Africana civilizations. Rasta philosophy of One Love will back me up with the example of how Bob Marley refused to call ‘Babylonian’ forces to arrest the youth man who came to ask for forgiveness for having tried to assassinate him. One Love for All! Peace and Love! Can this philosophy be extended to resolve the insurgencies ravaging Africa today from state violence to Boko Haram, ISWA, and al Shabab militants? Mandela demonstrated the love for the enemy by jointly accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace with DeKlerk who had held him in prison..

Conclusion:

 Steve Biko denied instigating violence as alleged by the apartheid prosecutor in court. He was accused of calling for the people to confront apartheid. Biko answered that he was being confronted by the prosecutor but there was no violence in the court room. Anyone who wishes to ‘waste … time in sterile litanies and the nauseating mimicry’ of the European tradition of genocidal violence will need to re-read more carefully the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth where Dr. Fanon, the psychiatrist, precisely and unambiguously prescribed repeatedly that we should shun violence as follows: 

"Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration." - Fanon, Conclusion, The Wretched of the Earth.

What Fanon, Lumumba, and Malcom preferred were war against illiteracy and diseases in Africa, the erasure of the colonial boundaries that divided and weakened Africans enough to incite xenophobic violence against fellow Africans who are suspected of stealing jobs and women, psychological healing of the slow-healing wounds of hundreds of years of terrible torture against Africans, party building for social democracy, and agrarian revolution to feed the people with adequate funding for infrastructures.  Walter Rodney stated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that when the colonizers pretended that there was no money for education, the Africans tasked themselves to build schools. C.L.R. James emphasized that the most important achievement by Nkrumah was the National School Movement.  

Azikiwe knew this when he recommended young men like Nkrumah to go abroad for the golden fleece of further education, and he called for scientific methods to be adopted by Africans in all their affairs. Awolowo introduced free primary school education in Western Nigeria but went on to commit the infamy of justifying the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' during the genocidal war against the Igbo in Biafra that killed 3.1 million people in 30 months. Steve Biko identified the mind of the oppressed as the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressors, and South African students demanded that fees must fall. Ngugi called for the decolonization of the African mind. W.E.B. Du Bois called it a necessity to ensure that at least 10% or the talented tenth were given the chance to pursue higher education to help lead the Pan African Movement. Both Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey agreed that education is the key to uplift the people of African descent! Down with Militarism!

Happy 100 Years Birthdays to Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcom! Peace and Love!

"I lost so many peers

I shed so many tears!

Too many of my homies

In the cemeteries

I shed so many tears!"  

So Many Tears - Tupac.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061

My Cousin Was Lynched as an alleged Witch

 By Biko Agozino 

 During the time of goodwill towards all, bad news came during the Christmas holidays, on January 2 2022, saying that youths who returned for the holidays from distant cities, accused one of my cousins, Agatha Mgboebuba Nwaba, of being the witch who caused misfortune in their village. She was said to be the evil one who consumed the wealth of her husband who lived in London and who was said to have complained that it was his wife who used witchcraft to stop him from visiting home so that she would not be asked to account for the remittances he had been sending home to build a nonexistent house. He was reported to have told the lynch mob that he was not concerned and that they should do what they liked with her.

It was also alleged that she used witchcraft to kill one of their sons and that the same evil powers prevented her daughter's partner from going to pay the bride price for her daughter after she had four children with the Yoruba man. The daughter allegedly claimed that she found an exercise book in the house where her mother wrote a list of all the people she had killed and the dates that they died. That may be the kind of lists that every family keeps to remind them of those who brought them gifts during ceremonies and who deserve gifts in return when they have ceremonies of their own. The young people were obviously too biased against her and the list of names confirmed the bias. 

They were said to have paraded her around town with a tire hung around her neck to shame her but she showed no shame, perhaps because she was in shock. She was said to have begged one of her cousins who tried to intervene, not to let her in-laws beat her to death but her attackers threatened to attack her cousin too if he did not shut up. They were said to have tried to shame her extended family by asking them to take her back but they allegedly said that she was no longer in the shape she was as a young woman when they came to marry her and one of her uncles feared that she was the witch that killed his wife. Another cousin who believed the allegations like most people in Awgu (a local government headquarters) reported what happened in Awgu dialect as follows:

Mgboebuba lili amosu laegbuishi ndu ibe ayi. Ive ogbulu egbu kalikwalu. Shite la eka ada e nwayi ('Chikwado' la di e) o kelu igbuko ka eshilu chofuta ive o la eme. Ndu Awgu lo daide juwe ive oji egbushi ndu eka va du ucha, ya shi lo ndu ino e ive ya legbu. Eva ndu o kalaeke igbukwe kaligbukwelu. O gbuagakwalu madu, kalegbukwe tufu adaide. Eva mpam la mmam, okeke kele la nwae nwoke, onyebuchi adae nwayi la nwae dukota la ekwukwo ndu o gbugolu egbu. Oo ndu Awgu jikolu eka kpufute la orie Awgu, megbuo akaje, kpuluihia bia la uhumbele ezi nnae lo tigbuo ye, palu ozue ga gbavuo la ejo ovia du la nduegu ululor.

"Ovokwe ndu Uka gbulu e. Oo ndu ime obodo Awgu tigbuli e, maka la oshilu va la ya la ndu otu e la egbukota ote va ha tie ye ive, va lo tizie ye nke oji nwuhu. Onwevokwe onye kpolu ndu uwe ojii."

(Translation: "Mgboebuba ate witchcraft and was killing our people. The number she killed was a lot. Through the efforts of her daughter ('Chikwado' and her husband) whom she was preparing to kill too, that was how it was discovered what she was doing. Awgu people caught her and questioned why she was killing innocent people who have clean hands, she said that her enemies  were the ones that she killed. The names of the people she was preparing to kill were numerous. She had killed too many people and was going to kill more before she was caught. My father and mother, Okeke Kele and his son, Onyebuchi, his daughter and his grandchild were among the names found in the book of the people she had killed. The people of Awgu joined hands to drag her to Orie Awgu market place, mocked her, dragged her to her father's compound in Obugo village and beat her to death, then they carried her corpse and threw it away in the evil forest at the farm settlement of her husband's village, Ululor").

"It was not church people that killed her. It was the people of the inner village of Awgu who beat her to death, because she told them that she and her group will kill all those who beat her, then they beat her so much more that she was left dead. No one called the police."

They should have taken her to hospital to make sure that she was examined by experts if she admitted these things under torture and they should have reported the case to law-enforcement officers. The person narrating this to me emphasized that she was from my extended family. After parading her around the town all day, ‘the next day she was dead’, said the narrator.  Highly educated people strongly believe in witchcraft. But the surviving son of the woman is said to be demanding for his mother to be returned, I heard. There is an urgent need to run grassroots workshops to reeducate the people or else mutual distrust and suspicion will reign.

 They may have killed the poor woman, fearing her as a witch. Lethal witch hunting happened before in the same town a few years ago when some youth returned from the cities, burnt a native priest, Nwamme, to death and destroyed his shrine on allegations that he used his claimed powers to control thunder, Amadioha, to kill someone from the village who lived in a distant city. But our people carry on under thunderstorms with the belief that lightning only kills those whose hands are unclean. The frequent occurrence of misfortunes leads to suspicions that someone is behind everything. Fanon was right that Africans fear spirits more than they fear the police and the army of colonizers, at least they can bribe the police.

I spoke with the husband, Remi Nwankwo, in London by Whatsap and he told me that he suspects his uncle as the instigator because he had been threatening his wife. According to him, the uncle recently sent him a list of dead enemies allegedly compiled by his wife but it was typewritten and so no way to prove that his wife compiled such a list. The uncle then sent another list that was handwritten but it was not in his wife's handwriting. He asked the wife to leave the family home and go and stay in a hotel for a while but she told him that no one runs away from his father's compound. The uncle then phoned and threatened to send 'ndu ogba ozi' or messengers to force her out if she did not leave. He said that someone later sent him a video of how some people broke into his house and dragged his wife out and beat her to death. 

I asked him if he has reported the matter to the police and he said that I must know how the police work in Naija. I do not know what he means by that but I know that it is believed to be an abomination for a family member to invite the police in matters that involve other family members as suspects. He said that he had been ill since he returned from a visit home last year but that he is better now and is working to save for his airfare back home to see what he can do.

 Contrary to popular beliefs, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) advised the new Africa of his Renascent Africa to move away from belief in witchcraft and develop the scientific methodology in everything they were doing. His aunt tried to scare him as a child by alleging that the reason why he once fell into a fire and why a dog once bit him was because his grandma was a witch trying to kill him. Zik stated in his autobiography, My Odyssey, that he did not believe the allegation because he said that his grandmother was a loving and caring kind women. According to him, the epidemics that kill lots of people are not caused by witches but by often preventable diseases. If witches kill people by poisoning the air, Zik reasoned, they too would breathe the same air and die for as the Igbo say, dibia la agwo otule, o dowelu ike ye la elu (the sorcerer who is concocting diarrhea, is he keeping his own buttocks in the sky)? Two years after Azikiwe published Renascent Africa in 1937, one of his future rivals, Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) published an academic journal article in 1939 arguing that Juju is an African scientific method that could kill enemies remotely by calling their names three times at crossroads. The colonizers must have been pissing their pants if Africans had such powers.

Awo believed that juju can be used by a detainee to vanish from prison even while chained to the walls. Zik was skeptical and asked for the proof of juju to be demonstrated through the scientific methodology by asking those who claim that they could change from one animal to another or fly on a broomstick to do so under systematic observation. Zik went on to test his own social scientific method of intellectual-activism by training journalists from scratch and appointing them to run his chain of newspapers to successfully campaign for the restoration of independence. 

Although his political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, allowed membership of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association to join as a group member, the party did not use witchcraft beliefs to organize (unlike Awolowo’s Action Group that relied on the Ogboni Cult) at a time that people believed that Zik was what Phillip Emeagwali later reproduced from a newspaper report as ‘the Spirit-Man’ that supposedly made him bold enough to lead the fight against colonialism. Zik’s son, Chukwuma, said that his father had no magical powers. 

 Reports of witch hunting are on the rise across Africa at a time of social, security, economic and political crises facing Africans. If we do not end witch hunting in Africa, the disaster that faced medieval Europe may be looming in Africa. During the witch craze, Europeans murdered an estimated nine million people, mostly women, according to Stephen Pfohl. According to Mary Daly, alleged witches were killed by people who claimed to be Christians and they killed them while chanting: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son’. 

 Today, the Europeans have come out of their dark ages, thanks to millions of Africans that they kidnapped and enslaved without pay for four hundred years. Nothing to do with religion or Obeah, wrote Eric Williams in Capitalism & Slavery (just republished); despite the fact that his high school teacher, CLR James, wrote in the Black Jacobins that the enslaved used Voodoo as the medium to organize their revolution against slavery in Haiti. 

Similarly, the National Church of Nigeria and Cameroons was used by the banned Zikist Movement to support the independence struggle by making Zik and others, living saints of Africa as opposed to European Churches and their saints and the war heroes invoked ancestral spirits of Chimurenga in Zimbabwe while also chanting the Rastafarian songs of resistance. Obasanjo wanted to use juju to fight against apartheid, and the Boers must have been shaking and quaking in their boots.

Max Weber theorized that it was the Protestant Ethic of hard work that first produced the Spirit of Capitalism in England and in the US compared to China, India or Africa; supposedly proving Marx wrong that religion is the opium of the people. WEB Du Bois (the only American Sociologist that Weber invited to contribute to his academic journal)  in Black Reconstruction in America proved Marx right and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed that it was the forced labor of millions for hundreds of years that produced capitalism, not protestantism which people of African descent embrace in their millions but still remain underdeveloped.

Now Europeans celebrate Halloween Day every year by giving sweets to children who knock on their doors at night while dressed as witches. They even allow people who identify as witches to practice their own faith that they call Wicca. At the same time, Africans are killing ‘witches.’ What if a poor child tries to do Trick or Treats during Halloween in Africa?

 When lightning strikes and kills someone from the village in a distant city, it is likely because people go about openly even during a thunder storm and not because of the priest in the village who claimed that he had the power to make rain and invoke thunder and deserved to be burned alive. It is not witchcraft that causes unemployment, poverty, and other misfortunes. When one branch of the extended family is doing relatively better while others are struggling, it is not because the head of that family used juju to tie the hands of the other branches of the extended family. Those who sacrificed to provide education or business startup for their children have seen more success among those children than those who failed to educate their children or train them in a trade and it has nothing to do with witchcraft. 

 African countries are at the bottom of the league tables of the Human Development Index reports of UNDP annually because Africans are denied educational opportunities by African rulers but not because of witches and wizards. Those who believe in spiritual warfare should say prayers but desist from attacking and killing fellow human beings with the bias that they are witches. Those who kill people for money ritual should desist from that and work smarter. 

 Difficult times promote witchcraft beliefs and desperate measures in all societies, according to a controversial academic conference on witchcraft at the University of Nigeria that was opposed by Christians. What distinguished the Igbo among their neighbors in the past was that while the Ibibio, for example, believed in appeasing or eliminating the suspected witch, according to my professor, Daniel Offiong who however failed to compare them with their Igbo neighbors who did not have significant beliefs in witchcraft; nor did he compare the Ibibio with their Tiv neighbors who believed that all their chiefs were witches, according to a brief review of Offiong’s book by G. I. Jones. 

 The current state of insecurity may be contributing to the rise of witchcraft allegations among the Igbo as some news reports indicate, though many more may go unreported, as I analyzed in an article for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. Let the youth be trained in scientific methods so that they can invent new technologies to improve life in Africa without blaming misfortunes on innocent people suspected of witchcraft to be lynched by misguided youths. Educate your children or sponsor them to learn a trade. No more witch hunting. 

 Africans must show more love for fellow Africans as the Igbo symbolized with Mbari sculptures where the living and even spirits cohabitate under one roof, according to Chinua Achebe. Stop trying to demonize fellow Africans to justify attacks against them. The fact that intoxicated drivers of vehicles that are not road-worthy but manage to ply on roads that are nor vehicle-worthy and cause many fatalities is not the fault of a poor woman in the village who should not be killed by people who claim to be Christians. If you see mobs attacking anyone as an alleged witch, oppose the attack and advocate for the person being targeted. You can also report it to the organization that is trying to end such violent crimes in Africa: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). Google it.

UPDATE:

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ssouth-east/762404-witch-killing-group-kicks-as-court-discharges-man-charged-with-murder-of-woman.html

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

Selfies With White Dwarfs

By Biko Agozino

This is a series of selfies that I took during the August 2017 solar eclipse in Virginia, USA. The shower of colors from cosmic rays that emerged as bubbles around my African silhouette image made me wonder where they came from and where exactly was the eclipse that I was trying to capture without daring to look the eye of the sun squarely in the face as it raced from West to what Nnamdi Azikiwe serenaded as ‘the land of the rising sun’ in the East, a poem that was later adopted as the national anthem for Biafra.

In My Odyssey, Azikiwe recounts tales of a meteor that blazed across the sky the night he was born in Zungeru near the great water and how tongues wagged about the prophesied greatness of the newborn before he went to live with his grandmother in Onitsha where he swam in the West-East flow of Orimiri and later grew up to challenge the Orientalist colonization of Africa by the West.

The images reminded me of the song by Bob Marley and The Wailers – Natural Mystic. Except in this case, being photographs, you cannot hear even if you listen carefully as Akinbode Akinbiyi advocated in The Sound of Crowded Spaces conveyed by photography. Rather, if you look carefully you will see the mystery of realism in the pictures even without hearing the sound of an eclipse, described with an app for the blind, from pictures.

As in Frantz Fanon’s haunting phrase, ‘Look, a Negro’, I did not make it up. It was not rehearsed and staged with special effects. My smart phone just captured what was not visible to my naked eyes or what you are forbidden to gaze upon, lest the awesome beauty blinds you for staring at, or evoking, what can’t be seen, a la Teju Cole who wrote about being blind-sighted by a 'blind spot' (probably because he had a strange habit of washing his eye-balls with warm chlorinated tap water).

The images also make me conscious of the indigenous knowledge system of the Dogon of Mali who are able to accurately predict the appearance of the Sirius star over cycles of sixty years for thousands of years and celebrate the reappearance. They also accurately identify the Sirius B White Dwarf that accompanies the Sirius on its visits to the earth’s astral path. Some colonial anthropologists dismissed this as a myth and said that the Dogon have no right to know such things unless some Europeans told them.

My ‘Selfies with White Dwarfs’ series of photographs of the fast-moving eclipse appears to be a reminder that certain meanings can be revealed by nature to those who are willing to look carefully and see what may be hidden from the wise and the prudent.

Some people posted on Facebook that evidence of the path of the eclipse from the north west to the south east, unlike the east-west rotation of the earth across the face of the sun daily, proves that the earth is flat and the moon landing was staged. Ha ha ha, my selfies with the eclipse were not staged, halo and all.

I have used one of these iconic photographs as the cover picture for my collection of essays published as a book: Essays on Education and Popular Culture: Massliteracy, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019. Can you tell which picture was used as the book cover?

The pictures approximate the streams of consciousness that travelled with the eclipse from West to East, unlike the eye of the sun that goes from East to West, but exactly like the course of the great river Niger from the West to the Southeast across West Africa.

The pictures were submitted for exhibition in Recontres de Bamako 2019 and this blog post alludes to the Director’s statement but the entry was not accepted for the exhibition.

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on Her Slave-Trading Grandfather

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.

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have lo...

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:

https://www.sunnewsonline.com/igbo-cosmology-the-meaning-of-ubani/

Biko

‘Trump and the Trumpists’

By Biko Agozino

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.

Weber traveled to the US to interview German immigrants for his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but scandalously ended up not noticing that capitalism had more to do with hundreds of years of the enslavement of millions of Africans as Marx, Du Bois, Eric Williams, and C.L.R. James proved.

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  …

Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason and writer of ‘Trumpism and Authoritarian Populism’ in C-Theory.