African Americans and Thanksgiving

By Onwubiko Agozino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama's Withdrawal Doctrine

By Biko Agozino 

It was Obama's idea to get out of Afghanistan as far back as 2010, even without a victory. He did not like the idea of fighting to protect corrupt politicians who did not have the guts to fight their own civil war. Bob Woodward wrote in Obama's War that the policy should have been to construct a Jeffersonian style democracy (as if Jefferson who enslaved hundreds of Africans and raped enslaved children to make more babies for sale was such a good role model for democracy).  Obama insisted that it was up to the Afghans what sort of polity that they wanted to build, so long as they did not harbor terrorists or threaten human rights. If they choose to build a more perfect union, the US will be there to assist them and if they allow any group to threaten the US from their soil, they can count on being punished again, collateral damages and all the 'deadly mistakes' of killing aid workers and children.

US generals told Obama to follow their recommendation to remain because they were the ones on the ground. Obama told them that he was the Commander In Chief and that he was giving them the direct order to find an exit strategy. Although he agreed to their recommendation for more resources by sending 30,000 more troops in the surge of 2009 to bring the troop levels to nearly 100,000, he made it clear that it was a temporary measure to accomplish the goal of getting Osama and getting out. He got his man in 2011 and immediately started rapid draw down of troops from about 100,000 to about 28,000 when he handed over to Trump. 

Trump came in and said that it was a mistake to leave quickly. He wanted to stay on and 'kill terrorists'. But he ended up negotiating with the Taliban for a time-table to withdraw US troops within a year after his term in office. Biden delayed Trump's arbitrary deadline by 3 months to see if the Afghans would come to a negotiated settlement on their own but their corrupt government bragged that they preferred to fight on. 

Biden is mistaken in suggesting that getting out of there was the Trump policy. It was the policy set by the Obama-Biden administration. It was bungled by Trump who may have demoralized Afghan troops by negotiating with the Taliban without inviting Afghan government officials. Some Afghan troops were sympathetic to the Taliban and were shooting US troops in the back, so it was no surprise when they refused to fight the Taliban and handed over their weapons.

It is to the credit of the US society that thousands of Afghans were scrambling into military cargo planes crammed like slave ships to escape their own country. It is true that hundreds of thousands more will prefer to move to the US than live under the Taliban or the impoverished society left by the US. Afghans can help to change that Stockholm syndrome by guaranteeing the rights of women and children to go to school. 

Obama already increased school enrollment for girls and brought women into the traditional ruling councils called Jirgas (reported by Wardak and Braithwaite in a two-part article in the British Journal of Criminology in 2013). Afghans should consider having a co-equal bicameral legislature with a House of Men and a House of Women and they should enforce gender parity in all offices provided that there is mass literacy. Abolish capital punishment too also in the US that retains what David Garland called the peculiar institution of a barbaric practice in one of the most advanced societies today (Garland attributed this to Jeffersonian democracy that allows home rule to local communities but how about Federal death penalty?).

After 20 years of conquest and occupation, the average years of schooling remained 3.9 years, according to the Human Development Index and that is the shame of US occupation. Bigger shame to African countries that have also neglected the education of African children and therefore hug the bottom of the HDI ranking annually; they are ranked even below Afghanistan. 

If 15-20% of the trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan had gone to education, as recommended by UNESCO for all countries, the country would have 100% literacy today. If all that money was spent at home on education, all the student loan debts of US students would have been paid off with some change left to help provide publicly funded education at all levels and healthcare for all. The Biden-Harris administration should pursue bold policy initiatives with the savings from wars of choice that should be rightfully ended and with the huge infrastructures budget.

It was reported that the Taliban made much of their war revenues through the drugs trade. They should now join states in the US by legalizing marijuana because it is known to be medicinal and therefore should not be forbidden as Haram. Legalization of marijuana will bring in wealth and employment opportunities for many families as they recover from the war and the government can tax their profits. 

At the same time, the people should learn from even the Taliban that alcoholism is harmful but use education rather than prohibition to control it. An estimated 95,000 people die from alcoholism in the US every year (68,000 men and 27, 000 women). That is much more than the number of US troops killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam combined. Another 95,000 die from opioid overdose yearly. Tobacco alone kills 600,000 in the US and six million worldwide annually though legal. Maybe many would not binge-drink or chain-smoke so much or be addicted to pain medication if they had access to medicinal or recreational marijuana as adults freely choosing to consume a natural herb that has never killed anybody, something that medical doctors recommend to patients for various ailments with no side effects.

Biden-Harris should lead the world by example from home by ending the war on drugs so that educators and healthcare providers can use harm-reduction instead of punishment to deal with the public health issues of drug use. End the war against the people in the guise of the war on drugs worldwide, says the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 

African states should follow South Africa and legalize marijuana without delay. African Union Commission should demand that South East Asian countries must end the execution of Africans arrested with drugs because they always release Europeans arrested with drugs and African states have never executed any Asians for any crimes. End pyrrhic defeat.

Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war

Michael Jackson Remains Innocent

By Biko Agozino

"In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism. The myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications." Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class

Sexual abuse is a vile crime and especially so when the victims are children. That was why Barrack Obama once wrote that he would support the death penalty for child sexual abusers but Michelle Alexander corrected him by writing that rape is no longer a capital offense for the good reason that it was enforced in a racist manner.

When two adult white men sue the estate of a dead black man for $1.5 billion for alleged sexual abuse when they were children, even after the black man had been tried and found not guilty of any wrong-doing, the benefit of the doubt goes to the black man. 

Michael Jackson remains innocent, according to the rule of law. He was taken to court and dragged through the mud of gutter media for two months with 85 witnesses and 500 pieces of evidence mostly gathered by the FBI for the prosecution. Michael was found not guilty on all nine counts. He was also found not guilty of giving children alcohol for the purpose of abusing them. #MJInnocent.

The prosecution even called Michael's baby mama who was going through a custody battle with him, hoping that she would point a finger and win custody. But she turned against the accusers and told the court that she had warned Michael against them but that he was too kind to beware. Michael would never hurt a child, she said.

A civil suit has a lower burden of proof and the two white men who filed the law suit in 2013 may be hoping to cash in but their story was not credible, though the law suit is still pending. Michael had settled a similar civil suit before with a huge sum of money though the father of the child was recorded on the phone saying that he had something to gain from the allegation rather than focus on getting the person who allegedly hurt his child punished for the crime.

'Lies of Leaving Neverland'

One of the present accusers wanted to work for Michael Jackson's estate after the singer died but he was not hired by the estate. Oparah asked why he would want to work for someone who abused him as a child and he claimed that he did not know that it was abuse even after he was grown up. 

They went into therapy after they had sons of their own and fantasized about sexually abusing their own sons. That was when they said that they realized that they were abused by Jackson when they were children even though they testified when they were teenagers that Michael was innocent and continued to deny the allegations as adults. 

They tried to get a book deal but no publishers would touch a libelous manuscript. They sued for a billion dollars and the documentary film makers got in touch with them to sensationalize their allegations for the HBO broadcasters of the Oprah interview with them. Lots of conflict of interest there. 

The Michael Jackson estate refused the attempted extortion and sued the broadcasters of the documentary for $100 million. Maybe they should have sued for a billion dollars given the way that the music of Michael was allegedly pulled off the air by broadcasters following the airing of the documentary.

Oprah Winfrey, a child sex abuse survivor, got a room full of male child sexual abuse survivors and asked some leading questions that indirectly exposed some of the lies of the two white men who now claimed that they did not know that Michael was abusing them as children. 

Oprah still managed to expose them as liars because they now claimed that they did not tell the truth during the trial, they lied during therapy, and now they want to be believed that they have no financial motivation in their false allegations even while suing for more than a billion bucks. In the documentary, they alleged that Michael Jackson raped them on top of a train station in Neverland whereas the said train station was not yet built when they were in Neverland. As a result, HBO is forced to deny cancelling the promised run of the documentary until September after it was suddenly shortened to April and Oprah Winfrey appears to have deleted all her tweets about Leaving Neverland.

Michael never abused them sexually but maybe members of their own families did abuse them (the way they imagined abusing their own sons) and they may have been prompted by hypnosis to transfer the blame to a dead black man for monetary gains. On a balance of probabilities, the accusers are not credible witnesses against Michael. #MJisInnocent.

Read chapter 11 of Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis to see how allegations of rape were used by white men to terrorizer the black community and to justify lynching of black men at a time that white men felt entitled to rape black women and white women with impunity. 

Ida B. Wells documented evidence that allegations of rape were the 'bare-faced lies' with which lynching was justified because the vast majority of lynching did not include rape as an allegation. Moreover, about a third of the victims of lynching within the 30 years documented by Ida B Wells were white men, especially those who supported equal rights for African Americans. The Michael Jackson Estate alleged that the media reports and post-humous allegations amount to attempts to lynch the legacy of Michael.

According to Angela Davis, early white feminists easily embraced the image of the black man as a rapist who should never be trusted by white women. The white feminists failed to realize that such a propaganda resulted in white men feeling also that they were entitled to the bodies of white women. Therefore, white men raped white women and black women in large numbers but blamed it on black men and 90% of those executed for rape from 1932-1972 were black men. This persuaded the Supreme Court to abolish the death penalty for rape in the case of Furman v. Georgia in 1976.

Davis concluded that the problem of rape and racism was that the intersectionality of poverty, racism and sexism flourishes under capitalism to the extent that poor parents would allow their children to have slumber parties with rich men but would not think of allowing a poor man to sleep in the same room with their children even if the poor man means no harm. 

The lesson for parents and children is to stop worshipping wealth and stop hoping that they could swindle or defraud the rich of some of their wealth by using their poor children as baits. Instead, they should borrow a leaf from the parents of the Jacksons and the Williams sisters: 

Invest some time and resources to train the natural talents of your children instead of trying to pimp them and hope that you could then sue an innocent black man for money to satisfy your greed for fame or to be paid what Du Bois called the psychological wages of whiteness. 

As Michael Jackson told the Oxford University Union in 2001, there is a lot of violence and neglect against children around the world even in the richest country on earth. Children deserve to be loved and protected from harm unconditionally, he said. The mistake he made was to allow white children to sleep over in his bedroom even though he knew that the racist system was stacked against him. He was found not guilty of all charges because he had the means to hire top lawyers to defend him and the current accusers testified that he never hurt them.

Asian Women Attack Adichie Unfairly

By Biko Agozino

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie isn't quite the champion of feminism you think – here's why | The Independent

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-feminism-trans-exclusionary-black-women-hillary-clinton-a8696931.html

A sister forwarded the above critique to me today without comment. I guess that she sent it to me because we had debated a similar critique of Adichie from another Asian woman that she agreed with and I disagreed with but we agreed to disagree on that one. I guess that we may also agree to disagree on this one given my response below:

Happy Sharpe Revolution in Jamaica Anniversary Day,

The young lady wrote very well as a fan of Adichie. I am also a fan and I have been critical in a friendly way as you can see in some of my blog posts republished by Pambazuka News. See https://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2015/02/explaining-success-of-white-man-in.html and see also https://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/adichies-americadabra.html 

The jealousy of Asians against African over-achievers is still showing in her critique. She expects Adichie's novels to read like the manifesto of the communist party or like Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Those are different genres from the novel that focuses on the lives of ordinary people going through extraordinary things. And even while telling the fictionalized biographies of Black Women, Adichie manages to expose racism, imperialism and gender oppression. The genocide against the Igbo in Biafra that she captures in half of a Yellow Sun was orchestrated by the British colonizers who armed and trained the genocidists and supported the food embargo. The fake Catholic in Purple Hibiscus was a victim of cultural imperialism. The lumpen bourgeoisie in Americanah were compradors fronting for multinational corporations. Her letter insisting that we all, men and women, should be feminists, should not be knocked based on dictionary definitions of the word feminism.

The error of the 21 year-old critic is evident when she wrote that black women are oppressed because of colonialism and not because they are black women. Only someone who has not walked a mile in the intersectional shoes of a black woman could say such an ignorant thing. Cabral asked how could any crude economist go to apartheid South Africa and suggest that the only problem was imperialism and the exploitation of the working class when even the working class whites who assassinated Chris Hani were every bit as racist as the Boers? The oppressed black working class men still went back to the homelands and townships to rape Black women and girls. Right? Watint Abafazi, Wathint Imbokotho. Amandla!

I will encourage the young critic to avoid assuming that she knows everything that is there to learn in Black Cultural Studies. She should bend down low and let Black women tell her what they know about race-class-gender intersectionality or articulation, disarticulation and re-articulation. Perhaps a doctoral degree in Black Women's Studies will re-educate her.

Hotep. Happy Kwanzaa

The previous discussion between the sister and I went as follows:

She wrote: Forgive if I have posted the article below but I have finally read it and think its excellent.  During the last US election campaign I was concerned when I read that Chimamanda supported Hilary Clinton against Trump. In my view, if Hilary had won the election, she would have serviced empire just as Obama did in no less aggressive and patriarchal manner! But it is unfortunate to say the least that Adichie is unquestioning and seemingly ignorant of Hilary's political deeds as a "daughter of imperialism" - to use the lovely and appropriate characterisation of Ifi Imadiume. Somehow women who are liberals end up aiding and abetting imperialism and neocolonialism just like men and need to be exposed when speaking truth to power instead of speaking lies to power.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-hillary-clinton-liberal-literati-coddling-powerful

I responded:

Hi Comrade

I read this reaction to Chimamanda and found it wanting. Ms Bhuto does not appear to have read any of the books of Chimamanda but unfairly tried to rubbish her over the highly moderated and vetted interview questions she posed to Hilary. Even at that, Adichie should have been given credit for challenging her submission to patriarchy.

I have not read anything else from Ms Bhuto and so I will reserve judgment. Yet, her attack on Adichie smells of jealousy and racism from an Asian writer who wannabe the one to interview American First Ladies better than a liberal Nigerian American. I will like to know how much risk Ms Bhuto has taken in her own writing to confront right wing political violence and patriarchy in Pakistan the way Adichie boldly does in Nigeria.

My dear Comrade (she wrote),

I beg to differ with you Biko and very strongly as much as I love the writings and novels of Adichie. I have read all her novels and can't wait for her next novel. However, I think the critique of Ms Bhuto is a valid one in regards to not questioning the political actions of Hilary Clinton in regards to Libya, Gaddafi, US foreign policy in Africa as well as in Haiti for starters!! I suppose we should do the "liberal" thing and agree to disagree on this one - eh???? 

This discussion has continued on a different forum and some brothers and sisters have asked for more clarifications. Here we go again:

You are mistaken in the assumption that hatred is at the back every critique. Internal criticism is a veritable African institution, according to Fanon. Mao also defended the value of internal criticism given that an unwashed face becomes dirty. Similarly, Achebe welcomed the critique from visitors who may see what the household took for granted but he cautioned the visiting critic not to assume superiority over the household members ethnocentrically. 

Those of us who are critical of genocide are not motivated by hatred but by the love of human life. Those who are opposed to the critique of genocide cannot say that they love genocide but only try to justify the unjustifiable or to deny that it took place. When I spoke to an audience of Indigenous People who survived genocide in New Zealand and I shared with them that I too survived genocide in Biafra, you seem irritated but they understood perfectly why I interpreted the play, Death and the King's Horseman in the original way that I did. Many of them urged me to write up that interpretation and I did so while we debated the novel interpretation on this USADialogue series during my trip to New Zealand and Australia. Someone has cautioned us that the list is 'monitored' but without saying who is monitoring the list and in whose interest? In any case, we are not hiding anything and we are not afraid of criticism.

If you read my work, you will find that I do not obsess about genocide nor about Biafra although opposition to genocide cannot be over-emphasized for it is an ongoing crime against the whole of humanity and not just against the Igbo in Biafra. You may have your reasons why any mention of such huge crimes seems to rile you up and make you suspect, wrongly, that the speaker is motivated by hate. An Asian woman, Arundhati Roy, makes reference to starving Biafra children too but I bet that you will not accuse her of hating you or your lords. I believe that she is motivated by the love of human freedom.

Arundhati Roy | Gandhi, but with guns | Part Four By Arundhati Roy The Booker prize-winning author and activist Arundhati Roy goes deep inside Central India's Dandkaranya Fore...

I could have said 'Two Asian Women Attack Adichie Unfairly' to avoid the surprising over-generalization that you appear to read into the clear opinion about two Asian women who did attack Adichie unfairly. My intervention was not motivated by hatred of Asian women but by a call for more voices to join the condemnation of the genocidal crimes that Adichie condemns in her work. I could have qualified that private communication with you by inserting a comma before 'everything she has written', I could have added 'virtually' to 'everything'. But as I told you, the long sentence should not be read out of context. 

Nevertheless, even when Adichie does not use the word genocide, her work almost always goes against mass violence such as femicide which the WHO recognizes to be of genocidal proportions worldwide. The two Asian women who attacked her could have applied her thoughts to combat the epidemic of femicide and genocide that is going on in Asia and around the world. If Asians were being executed in Africa for drugs offences at the rate that Asian countries are executing Africans, you would have heard African writers advocating for penal abolitionism in the interest of all. Mamdani condemned genocide in Uganda and Museveni invited the Asians who were expelled by Idi Amin to return, but he is yet to invite the descendants of enslaved Africans to return.

I write as someone who has also been very critical of aspects of the work of Adichie but without rubbishing her valuable contributions to the defense of human dignity worldwide. Africans have shown the willingness to adopt ideas from Asian writers without unfairly dismissing them as not being committed to human rights. Ghanaian students successfully protested against the statue of Gandhi on their campus partly because of his prejudiced opinions against Africans in his younger years before he was reeducated by the Zulu about nonviolence, according to Gandhi himself in his autobiography. Is there any statue of Nkrumah in India and if not why not? The critique of Gandhi is shared by Indians too and they and Africans embrace some ideas of Gandhi nevertheless. 

The Asian writers who attack Adichie unfairly have not attacked white feminist writers and African women have not attacked Asian feminist writers, to the best of my knowledge. I have questioned the condescending approach to African writers by the likes of Naipaul and Spivak elsewhere without hating all their works and without generalizing their flaws to all Asians. Cultural criticism is not powered by hatred but by the love of culture defined by Ngugi and by Cabral as the struggle for and against domination, not as a way of life.

Do not campaign for Adichie to be awarded the Nobel Prize because, prize or no prize, she will remain an important voice for the whole world to listen to, not just a voice for her generation as you suggested. No matter how her scripted interviews with US First Ladies are perceived, no matter how much two Asian women wish that she would become the mouthpiece for their political slogans, Adichie is not the enemy of the people to be despised. As your Iyawo demonstrates to you, the young bard deserves all the admiration that she can get in her passion for social justice that she narrates with a compelling voice that is hard to ignore. Those who are jealous of her success should go ahead and write the type of books that they wished that she should write for them.

Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Umoja.

It is the season of rhetorical questions with implicit answers. Those who still do not get it should read the interventions of my teacher, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, which you can find on his Rethinking Africa blog or in his Pambazuka News columns if you have no access to his paradigmatic books. If your eyes are failing you, turn off the Nollywood movies and get someone to read to you. Here is a sample:

What the Igbo genocide is and what it isn’t | Pambazuka News

What the Igbo genocide is and what it isn’t | Pambazuka News

Biko