Marxism in Africana Studies

 

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

The Africans of Tobago

By Biko Agozino

An African Tobagonian sister once took me on a trip from Trinidad to the beautiful island of Tobago to learn more about the culture and traditions of the predominantly African people who live there (Trinidad and Tobago is probably the only country that officially identifies people of African descent as Africans). I was expecting to stay in a hotel but similar to the African tradition of hospitality, I was given a bed and home cooked meals in the home of a then 81 year old artist aunt of hers who raised ten children in that three bedroom house the way many African parents do raise large families back in Africa. 

I just heard that she passed away on January 10, 2023, a few days after her 98th birthday. Here was the beautiful young lady posing with my sons and I in April 2009, photographed by her now deceased artist son, Wilcox (who had taken me to the beach on that first visit to make sand sculptures and I made a bridge between the maps of Tobago and Africa). Mama Myrtle Morris will never die, she is immortal just like her paintings. Rest in Beauty.

When I asked her how she could raise so many children in the home that size, she explained that it was not just her ten children but also the children of others who were sometimes dropped off by their parents for all of the summer holidays and she would care for all of them as if they were hers. Once, an immigrant from a different island stayed with her for one month prior to delivering her baby and then left the baby with her for a week but never returned until eight months later to pick up the baby just because the host herself was due to deliver her own baby in the hospital. All this sounds very familiar to an African like me who grew up in the Nigerian countryside.

The sister that took me to the island advised me to have a heavy breakfast because I was going to walk until I dropped but I smiled knowing how much I walked while growing up in Africa. In the end, the sister was the one complaining of being tired from all that walking. First, we walked up to upper Scarborough where the Tobago House of Assembly was located. In front of the Assembly I saw the monument to Mr James, a nationalist politician who allegedly committed suicide after he lost the first independence election. We walked up to the top of the hill to enjoy the breath-taking views of the coastline and view King James Fort which was started by the British in the year 1777 but completed by the French after they defeated the British only to lose the island to the British again around 1831. In those days, the British administered Tobago and Grenada together as one colonial territory until 1854 when it became linked administratively with Trinidad. The hospital that was located at the fort was said to be manned by mostly Nigerian medical doctors at the time of my visit in 2008.

In the evening, a retired son of my hosting mother volunteered to drive us to meet a 91 year old school mate of his mother to hear more about the culture of the Africans who live there. First of all, we stopped to speak with Mr Wendell Buckley, the local member of the House of Assembly who was also the Assistant Secretary for Culture. Although it was a Saturday evening and his constituency office was closed, he invited us to his office and gave an informal interview that I found fascinating. Again, this reminds me of the concept of African time which is known as Trinidad time over there, the idea that time can be flexible and so office hours do not have to run by the clock, that the office can be opened at odd hours to serve the people without demanding for overtime payment or any other reward other than the joy of sharing your own culture with a visiting brother.

Mr Buckley (the name of the Irish priest in my home town, Awgu) told me that he returned recently from a visit to Guinea where he went to study Balenke drumming and where he wept to see the misery and poverty in which his fellow Africans were forced to live in this day and age. He wondered how the chief of the village could be allowed to suffer from leprosy in his 700 year old hut when there is medication in the world to eradicate the disease, why a woman was left to wander about with open lesions on her chest, why the people are made to live in such little huts decades after winning their independence from France under the inspirational Sekou Toure, and whether there is anything his country could do to help his fellow Africans back in the motherland?

But he also wondered how the people could suffer such material deprivation by day and still find the joy to celebrate and honour their ancestors with drumming, singing and dancing by night. Just as I was not allowed to lodge in a hotel during my visit, he was also provided accommodation in the hut of one of the families during his visit to Guinea. He wondered why our ancestors suffered such unimaginable cruelty during slavery only for their descendants to enjoy a much higher standard of living than many of their fellow Africans back in Africa today.

Then he described in detail, the ‘salaaka’ feasts honouring the ancestors that I am so familiar with in my Igbo culture. He said that you will find similar feasts throughout the Eastern Caribbean where it goes by different names like Communa festival in Jamaica and Congo festival or salaaka in Tobago. The people of Tobago known as Congo people originated from Igbo, Ashanti, Congolese, Mandinkes and Dahomey enslaved people. He proudly asserted that his grandfather was a ‘Congo Boy’ - a reference to the belief that he was a pure African who did not mix with the other ethnic groups unlike the ‘red people’ who descended from Igbo women that the Europeans raped while they worked as enslaved people in the houses of the masters. He suggested that most enslaved people in Barbados were Igbo and Congolese while Jamaicans were mostly Ashanti but Tobago is more diverse.

Part of their cultural tradition from Africa was the strong belief in ‘obeah’ or protective rituals and invocations that are done under the strict guidance of elders. The water for libations is usually left for seven days in the dew and then taken to a crossroad with four junctions to pour libations to the ancestors. Anyone who grew up in the African countryside will be familiar with the significance of the cross roads as a preferred site of ancestral offerings while the symbolism of the number four in Igbo cosmology with four market day week was not lost on me. From the road intersection, the ritual moves to a sacred compound where some animals are slaughtered and sometimes the blood is poured down a hole in the ground although some no longer allow the sacrifice and insist only on the feast.

There is drumming and chanting until the spirits of the ancestors seize someone and makes the person to ride with them until the person is exhausted and drops. The person speaks in tongues, as many Africans back home continue to do even in churches today, to reveal the wishes of the ancestors who might counsel against a certain course of action or support it as the case may be. Following that, the people would give thanks to the ancestors for their guidance and feast on roasted pork until the morning.

Mr Buckley later took us to see the 91 year old woman who lived above Congo Hill but we traveled along a road called Top Hill Road which translates literally to Enugu, my home state in Nigeria. The English would have said Hill Top but the Africans were probably translating from their own language when they named it Top Hill or Enugu. As soon as we got there, the old woman asked us to show some love by giving her presents and the politician explained that Africans consider it rude to visit an elder without presents. What amazed me was that as soon as I put my hands into my pocket, the old woman correctly mentioned the amount of money I was going to give her!

She offered us something to drink and we each had a glass of water. Brother Buckley brought out two drums and gave one to the elder. They both started playing and chanting and I was almost convinced that some of the words were Igbo words that I could recognize and the words meant the same thing in Igbo (although the sounds could mean something different in other languages too)! For instance, in a fertility chant in which women were supposed to call for salt water (sperm) to be given to them while gyrating and the men were supposed to follow by chanting ‘Mama Kalukalu (penis in their local dialect) Keliwe (erection in Igbo), I was simply amazed. As if reading my thoughts, the old woman launched into the most energetic drumming that would shame many young men, chanting ‘Igbo lele’ or simply; be vigilant. the Igbo, in my language or something like that (and I understand that this was one of the rallying chants of the Haitian Revolution). Her final chant was about Jonah surviving in the belly of the beast on his way to Nineveh and Mr Buckley explained that the enslaved used such metaphors to deceive the slave-holders into thinking that they were worshiping the white man’s God while they were performing their ancestral rituals.

Finally, the old woman told the story of Gangan Khan who is a mythical figure in Tobago and who was said to have flown from Africa to the island but could not fly back because she ate too much salt. The symbolism of this for excessive salt consumption by the enslaved who were fed salt-fish by the Europeans and the high incidence of hypertension among people of African descent was noted. They said that there is a grave where Gangan Khan was buried but I did not visit it on that occasion. Mr Buckley said that he regretted that he could not learn how to fly when he visited Guinea and I told him that there is always the airline. When next I visited I planned to try to see the grave of Gangan Khan and perhaps attempt a documentary film about the narratives or the people.

Fuss a August: Emancipation Day Commemoration

My hosting mother told a story about an old African woman, Mamu, who lived on Congo Hill and who did not speak a word of English. She always celebrated Emancipation Day on Fuss a August (August First) every year by dressing in royal African garbs and running down the streets only to put the clothes away until the next Emancipation Day commemoration. This sounds like a scene out of a movie and I was amazed that an island with such magical tales does not have a thriving film industry. I was tempted to start filming all the wonderful scenes that I encountered there but I did not have a camera that time around. Sadly the then 91 year old drummer passed away before I could return to film her.

Dr Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech. He was a Professor of Sociology, Deputy Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, Faulty of Social Sciences, Coordinator of the Criminology Unit, and Acting Head of Department of Behavioural Sciences, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, at the time of first writing in 2008.

The celebration of the life of Mother Myrtle Morris took place on 01.23.23, and the lovely event was live streamed on Youtube.

Ken Harrow’s Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out

'If you consider your friend to be an animal he considers you to be shit' (Tshi proverb, Ghana).

Reviewed by Biko Agozino

Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates always signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.

Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.

Right from the cover illustration of the book, the author wrongly suggests that the ‘dyed red sheet hung to dry’ in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Bamako, is a representation of trash whereas it is the valued African textile industry of ‘tie and dye’ that people wear with pride across the world.

The author reports in the introduction that he was warned about this choice of words in his earlier book on Postcolonial Cinema in Africa. According to him, Jude Akudinobi warned him against taking the analogy too far especially given that the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: ‘If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African’, he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans that is all too familiar from the point of view of white supremacy, a perspective that is contradictory to his otherwise pro-African views in his scholarship.

One of the reasons given by Ken Harrow for using the trope of trash to represent valuable African cultural productions is because he finds support in the theory of Bataille about the locations of trash in surrealism (Chapter 1). Here he said that he threw a challenge in his earlier book, Postcolonial Cinema, calling for a new Aristotle to emerge to theorize the new cinema of Africa. Without telling us why he presumed that another Aristotle, a guy who believed that slavery was natural, would be a suitable theoretical framework for understanding African culture, a culture that was wounded by centuries of slavery, Bro Ken decided to take up his own challenge.

Trash therefore appears to be a pitiable wrestling match between him and himself. His difficulty could have been enormously lessened if he had ignored Aristotle and examined the drama of classical African civilization in ancient Egypt that predated Greek drama by 3000 years, according to Cheikh Anta Diop (Civilization or Barbarism). The presumption of race-class-gender superiorism by Harrow is revealed when he cites Battaille as asserting that the upper classes make ‘almost exclusive use of ideas’ even when some of those ideas may have lowly origins (p.15). The Ken Harrow who writes everything in lower case letters in his constant online contributions to debates would have been expected to challenge Bataille here but he accepts the dubious notion uncritically just as he accepted Mbembe’s astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.

His only attempt to critique this myopic view about Africans came out lame because of his coupling of ‘glamorousness/repulsiveness’ (p.24) as if they are conjoined twins in African cinema. On the same page he demeans Ghana by suggesting that a ‘shit-caked handrail’ in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (where the handrail in question was not covered in shit cakes but in a ‘generous grub of mucous’, a wise hygienic advice to avoid germ-infested public handrails that is heard even in ‘clean’ countries) was representative of Ghana under Nkrumah. But CLR James would differ in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution by identifying the glorious National School Movement as a major medium of resistance to colonialism and a major achievement in nation-building, not shit cakes or trash.

Harrow cites Sembene Ousmane as identifying African cinema as the night school of the masses in line with Achebe’s subservience of literature to pedagogy but he devalues such emphases in African arts and cinema by following Ranciere to term them ‘mimesis’ or mere ‘representation’ as opposed to 'experimentation' (32-33).

In arguing his spurious hypothesis that revolutionary accounts tend to neglect trash, Harrow makes a grievous theoretical error by asserting that ‘views from the trash landscape…don’t figure in the Fanonian liberationist schemata’ (p.40). Quite the contrary, for according to Fanon, the dominant image of the colonized in the mind of the colonizer was that of: ‘Dirty Nigger, or simply, look a Negro’, dirty Arab, dirty Jew, or dirty Indian despite the fact that the colonized was remarkably clean compared to some filthy-rich members of the colonizing group.  

Harrow also erred historically by asserting that ‘western decadence’ is the source of postmodernism whereas Jacques Derrida insisted that his deconstruction derived from his African cultural background, a view that is indirectly supported by Ron Eglash in African Fractals and by Adbul Karim Banguara in Fractal Complexity in the Works of Major Black Thinkers. Recognizing African originality even in a western art form such as cinema would demand less obsession with trash and a greater focus on creativity and worthiness.

To his credit, Harrow throws in genuine concerns about inequality, revolution and protest about consumer capitalism and the export of toxic waste from the West to underdeveloped countries. The former President of Harvard University and former Obama economics adviser, Larry Summers, is quoted (pp21-22) as saying that there is a rational basis for rich countries to export toxic waste to poor countries because the lives of the poor are not as valuable as the lives of the rich. This is an indirect suggestion that the trash represented in African cinema may be part of the 'evidence' for the 'mock trial' of imperialism as dramatized in one of the films that he discussed.  With a chapter on the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, Harrow may be indirectly calling for more films on the theme of environmental justice in Africa.

However, Harrow neglected to point out to readers that the trope of trash is not an African trope but a Western one. The importation of trash is actually less pronounced in Africa than in the developed countries where interstate trade and transportation of trash was ruled by the US Supreme Court in 1973 as legitimate commerce after Philadelphia sued New Jersey for attempting to block the transportation of out-of-state trash across state lines.

Pennsylvania and Virginia are the top importers of trash, not just from other states in the US but also from Canada and Mexico in line with NAFTA, and the dumps for such refuse are usually located near poor communities where racial minorities predominate. In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers do not need a search warrant to seek incriminating evidence by going through the garbage left on the kerb for collection by garbage collectors. Also, Sweden had so little trash due to recycling that trash was imported from Norway to help power their trash-fueled power generators.

By contrast, African societies, like most precapitalist societies, managed to go on for centuries without generating mountains of trash until the unhygienic Europeans, as Olaudah Equiano observed, came to dump the excrements of their excessive consumption on the relatively deprived. Yet, not even Cecil Rhodes saw Africa simply as a junkyard of trash, he saw the mineral wealth and set out to rob Africans of their land and stole their labor to exploit the riches. Harrow sees trash everywhere in Africa and thereby missed the morality, the wealth and the natural beauty that are even more preponderant in African cinema despite the occasional scenes of trash that are common in Hollywood films too.

Instead of admitting that Africa is relatively unpolluted compared to the industrialized countries, Ken Harrow presents a fictional contrast between the suparmarche or supermarket in Paris and the trash ridden streets of Africa as represented in Sissoko’s La Vie sur Terre (1999) as if this is a contrast based on empirical reality that is verifiable in every part of Africa and every part of Paris – even the slums of Paris will have those gaudy supermarkets too while upper class reserved areas in Africa would be buried in rubbish. Harrow forgot that advice that his mother must have given him; do not believe everything you see in the movies. His dirty mind saw even things that were not trash, such as shoes on the streets, as trash.

I recommend Ken Harrow’s Trash to readers who are looking for spoilers given that his detailed plot summaries of the movies in the book are so well written that readers may no longer need to see the films after reading his book. The consumer warning to the reader is to beware of the trash talk lest you fail to see the people, landscape, gold and diamonds due to the obsession of Harrow with filth and rubbish - the 'below' of his sub-title.