To In Excelsis Gloria :

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Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jun 29, 2020, 11:27:07 PM6/29/20
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Please, short of spitting fire and venom, how does one begin to approach this question  :

Okechukwu Ukaga

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Jun 29, 2020, 11:57:44 PM6/29/20
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One possible reason is inheritance. People do inherit the assets and liabilities of their forefathers.

On Jun 29, 2020 8:27 PM, "Cornelius Hamelberg" <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Please, short of spitting fire and venom, how does one begin to approach this question  :

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jun 30, 2020, 9:14:54 AM6/30/20
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OU.

You struck the nail right on the head.

Some smart Alec musician in 2004 once asked me a similar question on a flight from the US to London.

I said to him the communities where slaves were taken should be beneficiaries of reparations.

If we cannot deny children their inheritance simply because the person who worked for the wealth is no longer here we cannot deny liabilities for the source of the wealth if the wealth is fraudulently acquired.

This is why there is contemporary money laundering laws.

If slave reparations are unrecoverable then the Abacha loot should be unrecoverable and his children should have the right to keep the loot since they stole no money.  Never mind that the loot originally belonged to other people whose name is not Abacha.


OAA



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From: 'Okechukwu Ukaga' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 30/06/2020 04:59 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :

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One possible reason is inheritance. People do inherit the assets and liabilities of their forefathers.
On Jun 29, 2020 8:27 PM, "Cornelius Hamelberg" <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Please, short of spitting fire and venom, how does one begin to approach this question  :

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Michael Afolayan

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Jun 30, 2020, 11:12:45 AM6/30/20
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At the risk of getting rocks thrown in my direction, I still think those who should pay the bulk of the reparation should be children of Yoruba Obas along the Atlantic Coast, who sold their folks to the Whiteman out of their wanton greed and self hate!

MOA







Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Jun 30, 2020, 12:59:25 PM6/30/20
to 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Oh my! A missile is more effective than a rock-
and a boomerang could always inflict the sender.

So children of Obas should pay for the huge
profits made by Mr. Alexander Barclays, Mr Yale, 
and  the “gracefully amazing” Right Reverend Father John Newton and his likes.Well I would agree with you if you can establish the following:

1. That the Obas placed ads in Europe advertising for “buyers.”

2.  That the Obas owned the pickup ships that
plied the Atlantic.

3.  That the Obas were aware of the enormity of the activities and systematic, sustained forced labor and psychological terror that ensued on the other side of the Atlantic.

4.  That the Obas gained resources and profits commensurate with that of the European traffickers.

5.  That inter generational wealth transfer has accrued in the African regions thus involved, at the scale of the recipient countries.

6.   That all the Obas consented to this activity without force, intimidation, and divide and rule
strategies being applied and that no Oba 
resisted the traffickers.

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association


From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 11:09 AM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Michael Afolayan

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Jun 30, 2020, 3:50:12 PM6/30/20
to 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
I am an "Omo Ode"; missiles are my toys (a polite way of saying, bring it on, Gloria). 

Mr. Barclays, Mr. Yale, Fr. Newton, etc., are not my folks. I'll let their own people deal with them. I am at liberty to talk senses to the skulls of my people, am I not? Yep, the last I heard, it was not a "Not-for-profit" NGO business for those Yoruba Obas either. They better pay - serious restitution money I'm talking about here, because they sold their folks to the Barclayses, the Yales, and the Newtons. Some of us are ashamed of their deeds and regardless of what their apologists say about them, we still hold them equally accountable; after all, if they did not create the cracks on their walls, those lizards could not crawl in and haul their folks away.

 Just my protest. My in-laws are a part of the culprits.

MOA

===

Gloria Emeagwali

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Jun 30, 2020, 4:54:46 PM6/30/20
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I recall that one of the aims of Usman Dan Fodio in 1804 was to put an end to human trafficking,  and although the processes of jihadism actually led to the generation of more  war captives, indirectly, this is a clear case of a leader and a movement that went against the activity. 

Your mea culpa is admirable but it would not interrupt the movement for reparations from institutions that benefited hugely- even when undermined - at this historic moment.

 Thanks a lot for your timely contribution to that movement.

GE







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On Jun 30, 2020, at 3:50 PM, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jun 30, 2020, 7:06:35 PM6/30/20
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The long-standing issue of Reparations wasn’t taken up by Brother Obama (Luo father from Kenya) not during his first term as first Black President ever and not in the Second term either. If he had as much as raised the issue during his first term, it’s almost certain that he would not have served a second term, based on these sort of arguments advanced by David Horowitz long before Obama set foot in the White House. The idea of  Reparations, of so called “Black Privilege”, of  painting the White House BLACK – the colour of the occupant, would have succeeded in dividing the USA as never before and would have also only succeeded in enraging Trump and his White Supremacists and most likely witnessed an increase in USA-Police-Brutality as an inevitable backlash – part of the unwritten policy as a general consensus and tacit understanding of “keeping niggers in their place”, of “ keeping the niggers in check”

For that reason, Obama did not take up the Reparations cause in the second term either ( Trump would have asked for a more thorough examination of Brother Obama’s Birth Certificate and would have probably started a Back-to-Africa Crusade, to the lands of Obama’s ancestors and for the  Black, African and  African-American Brothers and Sisters  - if Brother Obama had insisted. Needless to say, neither Pa nor Ma Clinton pushed the idea either.

Even though Black Lives Matter and the somewhat counter-revolutionary All Lives Matter is the immediate background to the next presidential elections , Reparations is still not in the air.

The question remains, if not now, when?

 In the meanwhile, Trump is  busy selling himself as the law and order President appointed by God, approved by God and the Founding Fathers, after Obama,  and especially sent by God to protect America’s sacred monuments and confederate legacies.

Trump is currently expanding his base to incorporate skills over degrees…

With improved vocational training, a similar policy would develop fruits in Nigeria, although -  perish the thought  -  for some of Nigeria’s Big Buk and, even if they have not ever been near the Palace,  some of the Buckingham Palace Big Grammar people the idea of skills over degrees in the employment market, is anathema

It goes without saying, that skills is the essence of Germany’s industrial pre-eminence, whilst a lack of the requisite manpower requirements is why the Chinese move in with their complete workforce to execute whatever project, in record time….

 


On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 05:27, Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Please, short of spitting fire and venom, how does one begin to approach this question  :

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Patrick Effiboley

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Jun 30, 2020, 7:06:43 PM6/30/20
to 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Dear all,

I will bring my ''grain de sel'' into this discussion. 
Although the rethoric is common, it is unfair or at least partial to say that the traditional rulers sold their children to the Barclays, Newtons, etc.  When one historicizes the relations between European nations with Africa at least from the eve of western modernity (ie 15th century) one can grasp what happened. 

For instance, Georges Balandier in his book The daily life in the kingdom of Kongo (1968), explained what happened with Portuguese missionaries in the 15th century when they went into relations with the Kongo. From cordial relations that led to sending ambassadors to Lisbon and vice versa, the king of Kongo started sending young boys to Lisbon to study. It is in that context that the first indigenous bishop was trained and rule the diocese of Kongo in 1504-1506 (circa). This was the context when Christopher Columbus went to the America and that later bishop Las Casas plead for the replacement of America's indigenous people with Kongo people that used to be sent to Lisbon and other nations.
Another argument is that when we look through the constitutions of African empires  and kingdoms (the Mande chart or 51 laws of Huegbadja in Danxome, etc.), there is no place for slave in the sense of what happened during the transatlantic deportation. A contrario, Colbert in France was the one who theorized on the status of the Black man in order to justify the deportation. So, we Africans should stop perpetuating this idea that our ancestors sold their children. The fact was far more complex and Western nations also erased or hided a lot of documents that could help bring light into this dark part of our common history.


Dr Emery Patrick EFFIBOLEY
Assistant Professor, 
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Abomey-Calavi 
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg,(2014-2016) 
 


Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jun 30, 2020, 7:44:11 PM6/30/20
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I’m still hoping for a fulsome reply ( the female touch) and at least some comforting words from First Lady Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali, to whom the question is also addressed.

The long-standing issue of Reparations wasn’t taken up by Brother Obama (Luo father from Kenya), not during his first term as first Black President ever and not in the Second term either. If he had as much as raised the issue during his first term, it’s almost certain that he would not have served a second term, based on these sort of arguments advanced by David Horowitz long before Obama set foot in the White House. The idea of  Reparations, of so-called “Black Privilege”, of  painting the White House BLACK – the colour of the occupant, would have succeeded in dividing the USA as never before and would have also only succeeded in enraging Trump and his White Supremacists and most likely witnessed an increase in USA-Police-Brutality as an inevitable backlash – part of the unwritten policy as a general consensus and tacit understanding of “keeping niggers in their place”, of “ keeping the niggers in check”

For that reason, Obama did not take up the Reparations cause in the second term either ( Trump would have asked for a more thorough examination of Brother Obama’s Birth Certificate and would have probably started a Back-to-Africa Crusade, to the lands of Obama’s ancestors and for the  Black, African, and  African-American Brothers and Sisters  - if Brother Obama had insisted. Needless to say, neither Pa nor Ma Clinton pushed the idea either.

Even though Black Lives Matter and the somewhat counter-revolutionary All Lives Matter is the immediate background to the next presidential elections , Reparations is still not in the air.

The question remains, if not now, when?

 In the meanwhile, Trump is  busy selling himself as the law and order President appointed by God, approved by God and the Founding Fathers, after Obama,  and especially sent by God to protect America’s sacred monuments and confederate legacies.

Trump is currently expanding his base to incorporate skills over degrees…

With improved vocational training, a similar policy would develop fruits in Nigeria, although -  perish the thought  -  for some of Nigeria’s Big Buk and, even if they have not ever been near the Palace,  some of the Buckingham Palace Big Grammar people the idea of skills over degrees in the employment market is anathema

It goes without saying, that skills is the essence of Germany’s industrial pre-eminence, whilst a lack of the requisite manpower requirements is why the Chinese move in with their complete workforce to execute whatever the project, in record time….

 


On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 05:57, 'Okechukwu Ukaga' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
One possible reason is inheritance. People do inherit the assets and liabilities of their forefathers.
On Jun 29, 2020 8:27 PM, "Cornelius Hamelberg" <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Please, short of spitting fire and venom, how does one begin to approach this question  :

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Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 1, 2020, 10:20:15 AM7/1/20
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Note that Trump is  doing this mainly for his non- College degree White supporters, some of whom are KKK, but other folks will pass through the door in the process.

GE

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 30, 2020, at 7:06 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:



Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 1, 2020, 3:43:35 PM7/1/20
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My dear Rabbi Hamelberg, your original question on reparations (why should people who never owned slaves give money to people who were never slaves?) arose out of the wrong belief propagated by the enslavers and their inheritors that slavery ended in the 19th century. Slavery, as far as Africa is concerned, has never ended at anytime in history, but was transformed  in stages to colonialism (imperialism), Neo-colonialism, and now globalisation. What the enslavers did to Africans from the 15th century upward, their current inheritors are doing the same things today to achieve the same results economically under globalisation. The enslavers of the old derived their wealth from the exploitation of the physical labour of the Blackman while modern enslavers do not only exploit the physical labour of the Blackman, but subject the African Continent to direct plunder of mineral resources, unequal trade and subordination of agricultural productions to the interest of the enslavers. Nominally, African nations are independent since each possesses a national flag and anthem but the governments are slave overseers acting on behalf of enslavers in the US and Europe. So, the case of reparations will only arise after the economic enslavement of Africans have stopped. Talking now about reparations for slavery when we are still economically enslaved is like putting the cart before the horse.
S. Kadiri  



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Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 1, 2020, 5:37:17 PM7/1/20
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Corrected : 

Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali,

Many thanks for the explanation. I had thought that Trump was doing his best to rope in the working class of America,  that it was a move worthy of Bernie Sanders and that perhaps at his next rally rant Trump would be leading his folk to chant  not Beasts of England, but  Beasts of America with he himself as their chief prig, grand wizard and choirmaster. We now understand his self-serving spiel about skills above degrees. As dear Mitt Romney said about Trump, “ His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University”

Salman Rushdie warns America :  I've seen dictators rise and fall. Beware America

Good to know : Hujjat-Allah al-Mahdi ( alaihi salaam)

To tell you the truth, I’m really missing Brother Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the former President of Iran, especially since Iran issued a warrant for Trump’s arrest. There’s no doubt that at this stage of human and international affairs Mahmoud would have been exchanging some verbal fire with the Donald, the taghut. Only Ahmadinejad had the requisite chutzpah quality that would have been correctly targeting the devil in the White House, after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, now alive with the Martyrs.

It took the murder of George Floyd and Trump’s total lack of reaction to blot Trump out of my good book, permanently. 

Reality check: If Brother Obama did not even mention the word “REPARATIONS” during his eight long years in the Oval Office , then for a surety Joe Biden is not going to be the one who will mention or take up the good fight that his boss Obama failed to do. A really Black President would have had Reparations at the top of his agenda.

I’m not a racist, however, I agree most wholeheartedly with Biden when he says, “You ain't Black” - if you vote for Trump . Reparations is the very last thing that Trump would advocate – at best he would tell his folks, “Reparations? Over my dead body! Let them go back to Africa, to get reparations there.” Donald Trump is not the kind of guy who would be willing to die on the cross for a Black man.

I’m not a racist, but I wouldn’t vote for Mister Hitler or a White Supremacist either. 


Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 1, 2020, 6:40:51 PM7/1/20
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Dear Baba Kadiri,

Yesterday, the Democratic Republic of the Congo celebrated their 60 Independence Anniversary

Today,  Somalia celebrated their 60th Independence Anniversary

There is much to ponder about how far we have come and how much further we must go

 As Historian Moses Ochonu put it, “We historians value closure”. He was, of course, talking to his fellow academics – the texture of his language suggests that what he was saying in so many words was not for the consumption of ordinary people like us. And we non-historians who are not helpless and hapless electrons in the passage of time don’t we also want a happy denouement/ ending to all the suffering? 

Better some feasting at the high table down here on earth or up there in Heaven, after providing some vitamins for the worms that will nibble at us in the grave?   

 For the religious-minded, a special note on the devil that’s directly responsible for everything evil…

Serious Matter


Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 4, 2020, 10:01:15 PM7/4/20
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Baba Kadiri,

Thinking about Pius Adesanmi who liked Don Williams ( what would he have been saying now ),  my late friend Akintola Wyse who was a great fan of Jim Reeves (what would he have been saying today) and Chidi’s eulogy which rained down tears on this forum when Kenny Rogers passed away, just now when I’m checking out the relationship between country music and the Confederate flag

I have still not recovered from your reply which is truly depressing, and all the more so when we consider that at Independence, Ghana, 6th of March 1957, Nigeria,  1st October 1960, Sierra Leone, 27th April 1961, we were confident, optimistic, hopeful and determined as we held “ these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Sadly, not much has really changed with regard to equal opportunity for the pursuit of individual and collective liberty. For our American brothers and sisters, not much has changed and for some of post-independent Africa, even with a change of management, from colonial to indigenous Black self-rule, in some areas, things have only got progressively much worse.

 After the horrific murder of George Floyd we and the rest of the world have become more aware and alerted about the state of affairs for the Black man and the Black woman in the United States and in the rest of the world. We are now being endlessly inundated by historical information about how bad things were and lately – history still being made on a daily basis, horrendous reports such as, “ the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria – scroll down a little further and read about what happened on May 7th.

The saddest fact is that it’s because we apparently cannot successfully govern ourselves and that’s why people such as  late movie actor John Wayne and an American president like Trump can taunt us that we reluctant to go back to our supposedly “shithole “countries.

Maybe, things would have been different if we had been colonised by Sweden or by Wales? If by the latter some of us would now be squabbling about this kind of subject matter.

When I was in the first form, I had a penfriend by the name of Martin Yeo, who lived in Glamorgan, Wales. (Smile)

 If it’s in your heart to reply to my sorrow, please say something positively uplifting or hold your peace. 


On Wed, 1 Jul 2020 at 21:43, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Michael Afolayan

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Jul 5, 2020, 11:54:50 AM7/5/20
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"If it’s in your heart to reply to my sorrow, please say something positively uplifting or hold your peace." (CH)

Honorable Cornelius (you've had so many titles these days, and I just came up with this one because I did not know which other ones to choose from) -

Here is something positively uplifting, I think: Your sorrow is a collective sorrow, our sorrow, that is; and so I say, persevere, dear brother; this, too, shall pass!

Baba Kadiri was so right in his postmodernist interrogation of slavery, the enslaved, and the enslaver. One thing he did not add is that an aspect of modern slavery is totally unforced but volunteered. I once did a survey of Nigerian immigrants to the United States since 1995, when the United Sates Visa Lottery gained high momentum, and it scared me. How would you classify a Chief Executive Officer of an organization quitting his job, selling all he got in order to embrace a visa lottery inviting him to the united States only to get there with his family and having to work at Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, etc., flipping burgers? I had (and still have) many friends in that category, including a physician who became a cab driver.

Yep, I fully agree with Baba Kadiri, too many trees have fallen over each other; an attempt to grab the ones from the bottom first would only make the task impossible to accomplish. Follow the conventional wisdom. Do well to remove the mess the ones on top first after the other;  then, we will get to the bottom. Until then, when we talk of reparation, Trumpeters would only laugh us to scorn because we can only blow the vuvuzela, we can't score a single goal.

Just my thinking!

MOA

Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 6, 2020, 5:34:14 AM7/6/20
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Sir Michael,

Many Thanks for the thoughts and the understanding.

After 59 years of Independence a Chief Executive Officer from the promised land flipping hamburgers part-time at McDonald's in Atlanta, Georgia. Sheer madness. Who is to blame?

“Well, I don't know, but I've been told

The streets in heaven are lined with gold…”

 It’s utterly depressing that there are more Ethiopian doctors in any of the big US cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, than in Ethiopia. In 2003, there was a total of 68 doctors, 4 dentists and a (one) psychiatrist in the whole of Sierra Leone, whereas there were 39, 000 Medical doctors in Algeria, that year.

Indeed, our sorrow, our collective sorrow. You say that I must persevere. OK, I’ll try and soldier on. I have Jesus. I have no other choice. I guess that I must first understand the full extent of what persevere actually means, its breadth of meaning so that I don’t get you wrong.

 I have just looked it up : persevere, verb, continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no indication of success. "his family persevered with his treatment"

 The difference

Since it’s our sorrow, our collective sorrow, I had better conjugate the verb, include all of us, I must persevere, you must persevere, they must persevere, we must all persevere.

 Suicide is a major problem, one of the ways out of existential agony over here, you know.

If I were to complain to Suzannah the lady down the road she’ll probably tell me something soothing, such as to hell with social distancing, amor vincit omnia; not such a bad idea except that I’m not going to get into any “let's overcome it together” or "let's jump into the river together."

For good measure I have also consulted the Devil’s Dictionary and this definition got dragged  up from the entrails of Jonah’s whale:

PERSEVERANCE, n.

A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

    "Persevere, persevere!" cry the homilists all,

    Themselves, day and night, persevering to bawl.

    "Remember the fable of tortoise and hare --

    The one at the goal while the other is -- where?"

    Why, back there in Dreamland, renewing his lease

    Of life, all his muscles preserving the peace,

    The goal and the rival forgotten alike,

    And the long fatigue of the needless hike.

    His spirit a-squat in the grass and the dew

    Of the dogless Land beyond the Stew,

    He sleeps, like a saint in a holy place,

    A winner of all that is good in a race.

I have talked to Baba Kadiri a few times since I told him to hold his peace (we will soon be hearing from him) in the meantime  I am looking more closely at  Isaiah 53 about the Suffering Servant

 

 


Michael Afolayan

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Jul 7, 2020, 3:16:43 AM7/7/20
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This is why if and when I skip any postings on this Dialogue series, I make sure it's not yours. Even if I disagree with the content, like when you are badgering my friend, Farooq, I ALWAYS enjoy the free style (sometimes they are complicatingly Soyinka-like and sometimes they are soothingly Achebeic). Come to think about it, where in heaven or on God's planet earth would I ever find someone who would take one word out of my whole submission and build a full-fledge epistle around it? It's to your credit!

Okay, forget "persevere", Honorable Cornelius. I am Yoruba (100%); English is just one of several languages I have been exposed to and which I deal with quite often but Yoruba is my comfort zone, being my mother tongue. I really couldn't tell what exactly possessed me when I borrowed the "P-word" to identify with your dilemma. It only confirms the Italian dictum,"Traduttore, traditore" (A translator is a traitor). I am dropping the word "persevere", which I think is a verb, and swapping it for a better Yoruba one "faradà". Actually, I prefer its noun form, "Ìfaradà", which if I break into its morphological components, would give me four independent meanings (morphemes): 

- an affirmative prefix [Ì], meaning "the act or fact of"+  
- the proposition/first split verb [fi], meaning "with", + 
- the noun [ara], meaning "body" + and
- the second split verb [dà], meaning "receive", "take", or "bear" 

Altogether, the four-morpheme word provides us the rich image (in meaning) of "the act-(or fact)-of-with-the-body-receive (take/bear) (something)." You can henceforth assume I meant to caution or encourage you to "faradà," because it is in "ìfaradà" that we can actually arrive at a consensus (not compromise, mind you) on this issue of reparation. 

Yep, yep, slavery is serious, unfair, forced and depressing but the type I just described )which Baba Kadiri further analyzed - like the burgher-flipping of the CEO, is unforced and insane. 

And by the way, why did you have to choose Isaiah 53? Bee it known that you are. delving into my favorite chapter of the OT! I love it for its enigmatic paradoxes. It brings to bear the Sorrow I was thinking about. I had to memorize it in Yoruba in the elementary school. Oh well . . .

Stay cool, and keep safe!

MOA

===

Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 7, 2020, 8:13:37 AM7/7/20
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Corrected

Sir Michael,

Good Afternoon! At this very point, my Russian Orthodox friend just called to tell me that this is the year 7528 and not the Hebrew Year 5780. This only means that one of us is living in the wrong year.

 Your morphological components are reminiscent of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes Go Camping

Yes, the language bug, the language buggers, and the de-buggers like our Nigerian brother emigre to the USA flipping bloody hamburgers instead of giving executive orders. That strain in British philosophy, logical positivism to late Wittgenstein. The Germans always a lot more clear-cut (and crisp).

Tempting Don Harrow here: I read The Myth of Sisyphus in Swedish and entered another world….

There’s also this: Slavery in the Bible

No worries.

I don’t know what it is in Yoruba (I’ll ask Baba Kadiri) but as the saying goes, “A fool will persist in his follies!”

As Blake put it, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Merde!

My good friend Claude Kayat has two mantras one of which is (as he throws up his hands and flails the air in true French gesticulation) “ Too many words!” – although ( I have known him for almost half a century)  - although he himself more than occasionally becomes as word-drunk as Dylan Thomas,  and, as you know, from a pure-ly English point of view, the French speak like machine guns, whereas the less aggressive Arabs don’t have any “ p-words”, they  lack the power of the plosive ( p) in the most eloquent Arabic tongue and that’s why Ghaddafi used to say, “ the bebble” instead of “ the people”…

Indeed, “Traduttore, traditore" (A translator is a traitor.” Period.

Sir Michael, let me remind you, it was a day of mourning when Tanakh was “ translated” from the Lashon Hakodesh ( the holy tongue) into Greek and baptised “ Septuagint “;  so, quoting  Isaiah 53 whether in Greek or in Yoruba falls short of the mark. Falls far short.

As to commentaries on such translations, well consider e.g. the noisy rogue reaction to Ambassador John Campbell who merely, so clearly wrote “ It is rare for the Department of State or the Department of Justice to say that there is an investigation underway, and neither has done so publicly.”

You too, stay safe, Sir Michael….

 


Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 7, 2020, 8:13:43 AM7/7/20
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Sir Michael,

Good Afternoon! At this very point, my Russian Orthodox friend just called to tell me that this is the year 7528 and not the Hebrew Year 5780. This only means that one of us is living in the wrong year.

 Your morphological components are reminiscent of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes Go Camping

Yes, the language bug, the language buggers, and the de-buggers like our Nigerian brother emigre to the USA flipping bloody hamburgers instead of giving executive orders. That strain in British philosophy, logical positivism to late Wittgenstein. The Germans always a lot more clear-cut (and crisp).

Tempting Don Harrow here: I read The Myth of Sisyphus in Swedish and entered another world….

There’s also this: Slavery in the Bible

No worries.

I don’t know what it is in Yoruba (I’ll ask Baba Kadiri) but as the saying goes, “A fool will persist in his follies!”

As Blake put it, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Merde!

My good friend Claude Kayat has two mantras one of which is (as he throws up is hands and flails the air in true French gesticulation) “ Too many words!” – although ( I have known him for almost half a century)  - although he himself more than occasionally becomes as word-drunk as Dylan Thomas,  and, as you know, from a pure-ly English point of view, the French speak like machineguns, whereas the less aggressive Arabs don’t have any “ p-words”, they  lack the power of the plosive ( p) in the most eloquent Arabic tongue and that’s why Ghaddafi used to say, “ the beebble” instead of “ the people”…

Indeed, “Traduttore, traditore" (A translator is a traitor.” Period.

Sir Michael, let me remind you, it was a day of mourning when Tanakh was “ translated” from the Lashon Hakodesh ( the holy tongue) into Greek and baptised “ Septuagint “;  so, quoting  Isaiah 53 whether in Greek or in Yoruba falls short of the mark. Falls far short.

As to commentaries on such translations, well consider e.g. the noisy rogue reaction to Ambassador John Campbell who merely, so clearly wrote “ It is rare for the Department of State or the Department of Justice to say that there is an investigation underway, and neither has done so publicly.”

You too, stay safe, Sir Michael….

 

Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 7, 2020, 9:14:08 AM7/7/20
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Cornelius The Wise,
Thanks for the link to Isaiah.

I decided to read some of the holy passages therein to drink of peace and wisdom. 

”Maybe I was wrong about half a century ago,”I said to myself. ”Give it another try now that you are supposedly wiser, and
have read thousands of books more,
and  visited two dozen countries more,
and met thousands of persons more,”
I  grumbled.

So I decided to explore the links that you  kindly provided.

But wetin did I find?

Misogynism (Isaiah 3)
Sadism(Isaiah 5& 10 &13)
Narcissism (Isaiah 9& 10)
Vindictiveness(Isaiah 13)

Infants dashed to pieces;
wives raped with no mercy on children, all in revenge (Isaiah 13)

Violence set within inter- regional politics against  the Assyrian bogeyman (Isaiah 10), and ethno- nationalistic triumphalism.

Do not underestimate the wisdom of
teenagers.

GE

On Jul 7, 2020, at 3:16 AM, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 7, 2020, 6:19:44 PM7/7/20
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Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali,

On the Day of judgement, I doubt that I will be asked about other people’s sins and omissions, other people’s lack of great Hebrew, other people’s prayer record, other people’s fornication and corruption or other people’s faults and misdemeanours.

Here’s Some Wisdom: Mesilat Yesharim: Chapter XVII: Concerning the means of Acquiring Purity

“And to purify his thoughts in relation to Divine service, he must give much thought to the falseness of pride. If he does so, he will be clean during the time of his Divine service of any strivings for the praises and encomiums of men and his mind will be directed solely to our Lord, who is our praise, and all our good, and our perfection, and besides Whom there is nothing, as it is said ( Deuteronomy 10: 21, “He is your praise and He is your God”  (Mesilat Yesharim / Path of the Just by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato zt'l Chapter 17 - Acquiring Purity with select commentaries)

 A very important chapter : Acquiring Fear of Sin

As King Arthur faint and pale once replied to Sir Bedivere:

“This is a shameful thing for men to lie.”

I am always, strictly honest, even when I go to the party to which the invitation craves, “dress to impress” or “dress to kill”. Honesty is the best policy. We don’t have to be paternalistic about it (like Michael O) – shmile – and as you know, there are many like Michael O who know or think / assume that they know, there’s even the Naija wahala police constable, self-appointed sanitary inspector of the Baga-Baga tribe like a bloodhound his pure nostrils on the lookout, flaring, busy shmelling the odour of corruption and bad grammar everywhere.

When it comes to abysmal ignorance, there is, of course, a difference between Jesus on the cross saying “ Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing “and the Rabbi speaking generally, who says, “ Father, forgive them for they know nothing!”

I must explain that my tendency is to address the heart or the implication/s in the question/subject matter, not to concentrate too much on the water is wet aspects…

You, Gloria, are not happy with Isaiah because of alleged

Misogyny (Isaiah 3)

 Sadism (Isaiah 5 & 10 & 13)

Narcissism (Isaiah 9 & 10)

 Vindictiveness (Isaiah 13)

and what you call “ethno-nationalistic triumphalism.”, i.e. the celebration of victory in Isaiah

Because I sense where you’re coming from (and where you and women’s lib are going) I’ll just say this: In the Morning Blessings, everybody recites, (in Hebrew)

“Blessed are you HASHEM,

Our God, King of the universe

For not having made me a slave”

Men and boys recite (in Hebrew)

“Blessed are you HASHEM,

Our God, King of the universe

For not having made me a woman”

Women and girls recite (in Hebrew)

“Blessed are you HASHEM,

Our God, King of the universe

for having made me according to His will”

You could check the footnote on this – too long to quote here but I’ll quote this bit which I’m sure you will approve: “Furthermore, women have often been the protectors of Judaism when the impetuosity and aggressiveness of the male nature led the men astray.  The classic precedent was in the wilderness when the men - not the women - worshipped the Golden Calf. Thus, though women were not given the privilege of the challenge assigned to men, they are created closer to God’s ideal of satisfaction. They express their gratitude in the blessing, “For having made me according to His will”

At the synagogue library, I watched one female librarian after the other come and go - in the course of two decades  ( as you know, in the United States, the college librarian has the same status as a professor) so you can imagine my surprise when I would chat with them and eventually ask questions about the Torah and would get the answer, “ Ask the Rabbi” . Lilian  – the one I asked most, directed my attention away from Torah and towards Halacha  - and for a few weeks, I was puzzled by this until  this sank in Judaism : Women not supposed to study Torah

Halacha is very important

Music: Anat Cohen:  "And The World Weeps"

Respectfully,

Cornelius


Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 8, 2020, 10:37:18 AM7/8/20
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“Prepare slaughter for his children
for the inequity of their fathers,
that they do not rise nor possess the land nor fill the face of the world with cities....”

Isaiah 14:21
.................

“...for the waters of Dimon shall be full
Of blood for I will bring more upon Dimon, lions upon him that escapeth of Moab....”

Isaiah 15:9
...................
“ and I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians; and they shall fight every one against his brother and everyone against his neighbor; city against city and kingdom against kingdom, and the spirit of Egypt shall
fail in the midst thereof....”

Isaiah 19
......................
And the Lord said Like as my servant
Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot
for three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia so shall the King of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners and the Ethiopians captive .....

Isaiah 20
......................

Ok.  Enough for today, in this era of 
decolonization, detoxification, demilitarization, re-education, rethinking and decentering, spurred by  George Floyd, the Martyr.



GE



Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 7, 2020, at 6:19 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:



Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 8, 2020, 1:11:04 PM7/8/20
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gloria
if you hunt hard, you might find some religion without the equivalents to this, but i doubt it.
they mostly condemn "non-believers," and if you want me to turn to african faiths, well, there used to be twin sacrifices--or the opposite--as well, not to mention current witchhunts and albino sacrifices. the buddhists always seemed ideal to me as a child, young man--but along came sri lanka and the slaughter of more innnocents, not to mention the equivalent in burma now.
the list is pretty endless.
the great hindu epics celebrate the war victories of the gods.

i learned to read them allegorically; and frankly i would read any of the religious texts you cite on more than, or not at all on, the level of realism. not just because people were not writing realism or reading realism till the 19th c, mostly, but because the readings are richer if not read simply literally.

i think of religious discourse as human--not divine. as such, it is there in all the texts we encounter, including what we now call fiction or poetry or in any mode.
once we pass into the 18-19th c enlightenment, the attacks on religion became relentless. fine, i agree with ending allreligious abuses and powers. but i don't think our espousal of a religious identity is much different from espousing any other identities, be they national or racial or gender.
rationalizations to slaughter Others come in all forms.
(besides isaiah's poetry is often ineffably beautiful)
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 8, 2020, 1:11:06 PM7/8/20
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for example; Ancient Egyptian retainer sacrifice is a type of human sacrifice in which pharaohs and occasionally other high court nobility would have servants killed after the pharaohs' deaths to continue to serve them in the afterlife. In Egypt, retainer sacrifice only existed during the First Dynasty, from about 3100 BC to 2900 BC, slowly dwindling, and eventually dying out.

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 9:38 AM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Jul 8, 2020, 4:50:41 PM7/8/20
to Harrow, Kenneth, usaafric...@googlegroups.com
That is the point, Ken, these religious texts should not be placed on a pedestal- all of them.

To claim that this or that belligerent, irrational statement is divine or a pathway to
“civilization ” or “redemption “ or “heaven” or whatever, is a step too far.  We are on the same side here.

Unfortunately some people take the texts seriously,  or  use them selectively and opportunistically.

I would classify “this ineffably  beautiful “
text with Sun Tzu’s  “The Art of War” to some extent.


GE




Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

gloria

Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 8, 2020, 6:40:24 PM7/8/20
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My Rabbi Hamelberg!! Excuse my late response to you. I am very slow, nowadays, in everything I do because I no longer possess that youthful agility.

Slavery in every form should be condemned by all. No one should be enslaved in whatever name and that is why the modern enslavers do not want to call it the real name. Human beings are interdependent since resources are scattered around the world we have to share them equitably among our-selves. Wheat foods like spaghetti and macaroni became Italian and European foods after Marco Polo took them from China to Europe. Potatoes became European stable food after Christopher Columbus took them from American Indians to Europe. Had the Chinese been hostile to the extent of killing Marco Polo, subsequent colonial wars in Asia might probably have been averted. Similarly, if the American Indians had killed Christopher Columbus on his first visit, the annihilation of American Indians and seizure of their land by Europeans followed by kidnappings and carting away of Africans to America to work as slaves, would probably not have happened. Just imagine, the pale skin people who betrayed the hospitalities and the trust of other humans constructed racial hierarchy to justify their selfish and inhuman crimes.

Of course when the Spaniards first met Africans, the former called the latter Negro, which means Black in Spanish, although I am yet to encounter any historical record where the Spaniards refer to themselves and their likes as Blanco, meaning White in Spanish. After the war of annihilation, seizure of other people's land and enslavement of Africans, the pale-skinned people built a racial pyramid in which they attribute to themselves White colour; to the light complexion Chinese and Japanese - Yellow colour; to the ferric oxide pigmented American Indians - Red colour; and dark pigmented Africans - Black colour. Since no human being is as white as snow, yellow as ripe banana, red as blood and black as coal, the assignment of colour as a marker to identify each human race is artificial and subjective. However, the pale-skinned folk that assigned to themselves the colour White even went further to assign the epithet *coloured* to the offspring of a Caucasian and an African, as if to say *White* is not a colour. In the world of enslavers and the enslaved, one is acquainted, not only with the classification of a section of mankind as *coloured,* but as *mulatto/mulatt, quadroon and octoroon.* These classifications were invented by the enslavers (Whites) to determine the degree of exploitation to which they, the colourless can subject the coloured and their progenitors to. The fairer the pigmentation, the less brutal is the exploitation. 

Politically, there is absolut value in the sovereignty of a nation. Sovereignty, the real word for independence is non-negotiable. When the present day USA, the child of Britain, wanted sovereignty,  George Washington and Thomas Jefferson just pulled out the guns to drive away their colonial parent, Britain, who wisely realized that any attempt to quell the rebellion might cost her, her own sovereignty. USA independence was never negotiated. What happened in Africa, starting with Ghana in 1957 and onwards, was not attainment of sovereignty by African nations. The colonialists kept original keys to the houses of African nations and handed over duplicates to the leaders they appointed and approved for us. African leaders are forbidden to change the keys to our nations houses without the consent of the colonialists who also must approve and be given the assignment to change the keys, if needed. With the original keys in the custody of the colonialists, they have access to the homes of African nations at anytime and at their will. R.E. Robinson, and J. Gallagher illustrated the situation better when they declared in the New Cambridge Modern History Volume XI, 1962, that nationalism (as encouraged in our leaders in Africa) is a continuation of imperialism (colonialism) by other means (p. 640). Henry A. Kissinger was even more blunt when he wrote that many leaders of newly independent countries have had to realize, at least subconsciously, that they were inwardly a good deal closer to their former rulers (the colonialists) than to their countrymen (p.215, Nuclear Weapon and Foreign Policy by Henry A. Kissinger). As I have stated in my previous posts on this forum, the USA pressurised her subordinate Western European allies into granting national anthem and flag to their colonies while the purpose of colonisation, the economic exploitation was retained under the leadership of USA. Thus, the buyers of Africa's agricultural and mineral resources are former colonialists in collaboration with USA. The price of goods bought are not only determined by the USA and her allies in Western Europe but the money paid often in US dollars are kept in the institutions controlled by Western powers. The buyers of African agricultural and mineral resources are wealthy while the African producers are poor. USA and any of its allies in Europe can freeze or seize the assets of any African nation kept in the World Bank but African nations collectively or individually can never reciprocate. That is slavery in reality.

You asked, maybe things would have been different if we had been colonised by Sweden or Wales? Wales has since 1282 been part of Britain that colonised most of Africa and many Welsh served as administrators in the British colonies. Concerning Sweden, it has been said that there were Swedish attempts on colonial adventures in those days that failed. Subjugation is subjugation just as death is death whether it is accomplished by poisoning, hanging, shooting or cutting off the head. No enslavement in whatever form should be preferred. Why would Swedish colonialism in Africa be different from that of Germany in Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon at least up to 1919? While wondering about that question, permit me to recall what Professor Herman Lundborg wrote in 1914, the same year the first World War, that ended in the lost of German colonies in Africa in 1919, began.  In his book, Racial Biology and Racial Hygiene (1914), he wrote, "Our real ancestors, the German aborigines, are believed to have come into Sweden through the Southwest over Denmark about 6000 years ago. They penetrated along the coast and spread along rivers and lakes. That new Stone Age People later took possession of larger part of southern Sweden and spread further northwards. This more talented and vigorous race stood at considerable higher level of culture than the aborigines (in Sweden, my emphasis). The German aborigines were farmers and cattle breeders, and they had better tools.
The ancient aborigine people (in Sweden) are believed by several modern archaeologists to have been related to the Finnish People, so-called Finnish Aborigine, who are found nowadays spread over vast area of land from Siberia and northern Russia over Finland and Scandinavia up to its southern part. /…/ However, the German aborigines penetrated into the areas of Finnish aborigines, they chased and killed some while others were made serfs. Certainly, in the course of time a sure mixture between these different people had occurred. The German aborigines as the strongest procreated more.

"The Swedish people, which probably had appeared to be of these two or perhaps still several extractions of races - those questions are still not solved - has since accepted further miscegenation from several directions. Thus, under different times not only other German tribes have come into our country but also, to lesser extent, various non-German ethnic elements, such as Finns, Gypsies, Slavs, Jews, and others. Even the so-called Walloons played a certain role. The present times anthropological examination of Swedish people previously mentioned by me, however, evince completely that the German racial traits are still overwhelming in Sweden. Our geographically well protected location has contributed in very high grade, hitherto, something over what we could be happy, because penetration by the people from the East, as I have previously given prominence to, is not at all desirable from racial point of view.'' On page 85 of his book, Professor Lundborg identified those he referred to as People from the East which were agricultural labourers from Poland. He wrote, "These with Asian blood diluted Slavic people get more and more foot hold in the German countries and so arose miscegenation. The culture degenerates. Such a people exhibits, with certainty, less resistance even against external enemy." Jan Myrdal Literary Work volume 4 (SKRIFSTÄLLNING 4) introduced me to the books of Professor Herman Lundborg, the first Vice Chancellor of Institute of Racial Hygiene in Uppsala, 1922. From the aforesaid, it would not have been better, if Sweden had colonised us. The colonisers can never treat the colonised as their equal which is the actual reason why the descendants of slave owners in the US are not treating the descendants of slaves there as their equals. To crown the whole farce, the descendants of slave owners are in complete control of Africa's mineral and agricultural resources. Who are toiling in the coffee and cocoa plantations but are poor and who are drinking coffee and cocoa beverages and eating chocolate cakes? Who are deep underground excavating gold and diamonds? Who are wearing ornaments? I leave the rest of the interrogations for you to conduct.
S. Kadiri                  



Skickat: den 5 juli 2020 01:21

Femi Kolapo

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Jul 8, 2020, 10:40:43 PM7/8/20
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Prof. Emeagwali
Though, a rather banal idea, that our ideological sympathies in many cases influence how we interpret what we read also needs to be factored into the discussion of these and any other religious texts. If this is warranted, then the adjectives misogyny, sadism, narcissism, and vindictiveness and violent could be simultaneously deployed in a positive and negative light depending on one ideological leaning. And here I am referring not to an opportunistic usage which I agree is common to religious merchants all over the world.

a little book that I have read addresses some of these issues well. It is titled God behaving Badly by David T. Lamb. It is written from the perspective of a believing Christian but is serious though easy to read. It has a different interpretation of Isaiah and many other like “difficult” or “violent” verses from yours.
/Femi

_________________________

Femi  J. Kolapo  

History Department *  University of Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G  2W1

________________________



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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

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Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 9, 2020, 7:11:28 AM7/9/20
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I would be happy to have the other interpretation. We are all here to learn.

Can you please enlighten me on this by summarizing your alternative interpretation.

Thanks.

GE


On Jun 29, 2020 8:27 PM, "Cornelius Hamelberg" <hamelbergcornelius4@gm

Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 9, 2020, 9:23:07 AM7/9/20
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hi gloria
i know it wasn't i whom you asked, but if i can throw a couple of ideas into this.
jihad, in islam. the common conception, and a common usage, is holy war often pitched as war against unbelievers.
the higher spiritual sense: struggle, especially within yourself, against your own sinful inclinations.
the mahabharata and ramayana, struggle-war between two factions, with krishna engaged in the war. but it is a mythic war and the figures represent higher spiritual values; the war is only a metaphor for struggle.

maybe one last example, the most difficult for me, in a sense. abraham's sacrifice of isaac. the central event in judaism and islam, and reconfigured, christianity.
for jews and muslims, cast as the test of abraham's faith. but the entire edifice evokes a world of sacrifice, not one of child killing. sacrifice is central to all three religions i mentioned and to african religions. and it reaches out to bridge the spaces between the divine or spiritual realms and the human.
as in, Death and the King's Horseman; something more than a literal killing or death or suicide.

maybe the questions posed here might be, what if you don't believe in this spiritual realm; don't believe in the workings of sacrifice, don't believe ikemifuma ever should have been killed, or christ or isaac or those killed to accompany the pharaoh, or that the king's horseman would have served a higher purpose if only his will had not been subverted by doubts.

these events can enrich us; or they can be used to diminish us. nowadays i see pretty much only diminished understandings and debased acts using religion as an excuse for power, but it need not all be taken that way.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


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Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 9, 2020, 2:06:58 PM7/9/20
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Good points. So those Egyptian and Albino  sacrifices you mentioned were metaphorical , mythic and not real?

G

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On Jul 9, 2020, at 9:23 AM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



Femi Kolapo

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Jul 9, 2020, 2:23:14 PM7/9/20
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I find Ken's interpretation a persuasive alternative.

There are others. I will try a secular one, but first would like to decline to summarize the alternative interpretation that the author proffers who I referenced in my last comment on Prof. Emeagwali post. Rather than summaries and highlights, contextual analysis is the beef of this kind of contention -at least for me. my summary will not do justice to that author's interpretations. 
One thing I can say is that he situates those difficult bible passages and pronouncements in appropriate contexts -- the context of the entire narrative in which the statements were made; and the context of the legal/juridical and ethical/moral relationship agreed upon between the personas in the narrative. His explanations also consider that some of those statements and the actions they represent were but discrete segments of larger wholes (that had happened at discrete moments). His methodology implies that one cannot justifiably understand and judge one segment (a verse or only a chapter) without having factored in the larger story, the other interconnected but occluded segments that occurred in prior points of time. Thus, without considering the ramified field of play (legal, juridical; moral, ethical; personal, and inter-relational) to which those narratives or statements belong, our interpretations could be off or at best unfair. The author's method seems to me to accord with how many historians do History and I believe that scholars of the linguistic turn persuasion might also approve of his method.

But I can try to provide some more direct answers of mine applying my point about our ideological positions or, more generally world views, influencing our interpretation of texts: 

We say, for instance, that a gangster or a criminal kills or murders, but the soldier neutralizes and the state executes; advocates of physician-assisted suicide describe the process as mercy killing rather than murder, and we eat chicken and crab and beef and never say we kill or cannibalize them. Our enemy, opponent or somebody we disapprove of could be narcissistic, but ourselves and our friends are self-confident, our celebrities are regal, and our boys and girls we advise to “follow your heart” "love yourself" and to self-express themselves, etc. The feminists call abortion reproductive rights, the right-to-live advocates call it murder. Our soldiers, our governments, the judge respectively (to popular applause, generally speaking) could neutralize, execute, and condemn other humans to hang or to the electric chair. Do we generally characterize those actions as killing or murdering those humans who fall under the rightful, legitimate hammer of those legal and institutional persons? No. 

If I can push this a little bit more. I believe that mosquitoes and bugs have a right to live their normal natural lives, but we smash them all the time, kill (murder?) them, without ever using the word murder because we naturally justify our killing them on the basis of what we consider to be our superior right and need as humans relative to the (non)right and needs of the mosquito. The greater portion of the medical sector everywhere is devoted to producing death-dealing agents and tools to use to effectively kill bacteria (aren't we murdering them?). We could imagine their intellectuals, the old Majors among them as in Animal Farm, accusing humans of wilful murder and violence against them and plotting a revolt to boot!  

Thus, a consideration of the contexts of those Isaiah passages might allow a reader to see them as intimations of the idea of a judge judging, a government carrying out an execution, a sovereign reigning, a doctor amputating gangrene or cauterizing an infected sore, a farmer weeding,  an artist retouching, erasing, and cleaning up their drawing or painting in the process of creating their beautiful work of art; etc etc etc 

Hence, the reader of Isaiah whose ideological position accepts the persona of those passages to be at the same time God and the Supreme Judge, the Supreme Artist, the Supreme owner of the Vine/ farm that is the earth with all humans on it, the Supreme Physician, and the Creator of the Universe with its multiple billions of planets larger than our tiny earth would likely interpret them differently. S/he could be expected to apply adjectives that accord with the legal, moral, and institutional roles associated with the persona in those passages. 

On the other hand, a reader who is of a different ideological persuasion, and as Ken says here, who does not "believe in this spiritual realm" and therefore does not accept the self-representation of the persona in Isaiah to be God almighty (with those juridical roles and their associated rights and duties) or who considers that persona to be equal to or less than him or herself could be expected to lean toward assessing those passages and judging the persona in those passages as one judges one's peer who, perhaps because their blunt expressive self-confidence rubs against us, we consider to be arrogant.
/Femi

_________________________

Femi  J. Kolapo  

History Department *  University of Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G  2W1

________________________

SPREAD Journals of African Education: African Journal of Teacher Education || Review of Higher Education in Africa || Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America

________________________

F. J. Kolapo, Christian Missionary Engagement in Central Nigeria: The Church Missionary Society's All-African Mission on the Upper Niger, (Springer International Publishing, 2019) Preview

 

________________________



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Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 9, 2020, 3:29:13 PM7/9/20
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first, let me say i love femi's response, thought process.
i have one kind of basic disagreement.
i agree--we should make an effort to know the context--if we don't, we won't understand the implied meanings. it's like learning the language of the text.
but ancient greek, say, is no longer a living language; its people are long since gone. the context is re-constructed at best.

now that's true of almost everything, if you think about it. say you write an autobiograpy. those days ofyour youth are gone. want to ask someone about it? it's now a memory, already partially warped that way. the archive? same issue--see derrida.

what do we have? perhaps an attempt at fidelity. but femi's fear of not doing justice tothe text has to be balanced against the reader's ability to craft new readings, maybe readings more brilliant than ever existed in the past. how do we judge it?
not by its fidelity to or understanding of the context, but by its insight, which only you, the well informed reader, can proffer.
the key is "well-informed." i shudder, always, infinitely, at non-informed readers, or poorly informed readers, or biased readers, no matter how smart, who deal with african texts. it is almost always painful.

ok, one very small example. many years ago i organized an afr lit conf at msu, and invited all the theorists of postcolonialism and african studies i could get. one was said. said was quite inspiring, except for one comment. which i hated. he said to us--the world of african lit scholars, as far as he knew--that we ought to begin our studies with conrad's heart of darkness.
nothing irritated memore--then or now--than the suggestion that to know africa you have to begin with europe. as if europe created the thing that africans responded to. my argument was that to know africa, study africa and forget about europe's intellectual history. africans were creating their own literary tradition, not as a reaction to europe but to their own world. begin there. and conrad? well, if we want to know about european literature, ok--but that's another world, another story.
lastly, sure you can read things fall apart in relation to conrad or graham greene etc., but wouldn't you prefer to know about the igbo world and its language, discourses, etc., before worrying about the last line of the novel?
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


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Sent: Thursday, July 9, 2020 2:20 PM

Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 9, 2020, 4:34:37 PM7/9/20
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Femi did to me what I   did to 
Toyin, the other day, when he asked me for a summary. Luckily I jumped down from that horse, apologized 
to Toyin and provided some of the
information.

 What is Lamb’s interpretation of Isaiah? Femi is yet to reply. Instead we get some great methodological
advice, thank you Sir, but I am
still waiting for Lamb.

The examples given also seem a bit trite  but would be meaningful  if
Femi had pointed out that 
translation  issues emerged 
whenever you convert 
one language to another and that
Ideological, political and culturally specific moral coding also takes a toll on the final product.  So in the long run it can be a sound observation.

But there is no ambivalence in the attitude to women and even Assyria in Isaiah. The content actually correlates broadly with the geopolitical understanding we have of the region in secular texts. 

Said was not informed about Africa.I think I came to that conclusion when
reading “Orientalism” but that was quite a while. I have to re-check.

GE

On Jul 9, 2020, at 3:29 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 9, 2020, 5:19:22 PM7/9/20
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Baba Kadiri,

Only the monkey is agile. The elders are not supposed to be, even if these days  their legs will refuse to carry them as fast as they  would like  their legs to carry them to safety in times of danger;  no matter how hard they try, for sure, their legs become disobedient  to commands from the brain and refuse to run up trees as quickly as they would like to if it should happen that  one of Obodimma Oha’s bloodthirsty bloodhounds were to be chasing an elder. You notice that I do not say, “should be chasing one of us “. God forbid that they would do so.

Nor should we have any illusions about the genesis of the George Floyd  phenomenon that we are witnessing today and that has been going on since the institution of slavery in North America, that it precedes the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence which goes,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

when this was the actual reality,

and the fact is that

41 of the 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave owners...

All forms of slavery are currently illegal and that includes debt slavery - as is practised in Pakistan at the moment.

There is a moral to the liberation of  the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, according to the Book of Exodus and the Almighty’s exhortation to them in  Devarim / Deuteronomy  17:16  to not go that way again

Any slave-like relationships sanctioned by the Almighty is a question for the Rabbis to solve, within their own domains.

 As to the other question being discussed in this thread, Femi Kolapo questions like a Jain , so I won’t “ badger “ him and generally speaking I don’t like the bad in anyone who acts like an enemy.

There is the general understanding in Judaism  that the  Akedah is sufficient testimony to the fact that the Almighty does not require any human sacrifice/ sacrifices;  however Christian theology based on Vayikra / Leviticus 17:11 which states that “For it is the blood that atones for the soul” is believed to be ultimately fulfilled in  the person and personality of Jesus  the ultimate fulfillment of sacrifice, making korbanot unnecessary

,” For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

 The pundits can go on and start another eternal discussion about this….

 


On Wed, 1 Jul 2020 at 21:43, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Femi Kolapo

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Jul 9, 2020, 11:26:04 PM7/9/20
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Prof. Emeagwali, I agree with you and Ken that it was illogical to cite an author and contend that his arguments were alternative to yours and turn around to not say what the alternative interpretation was. I apologize and no slight was intended.  Rather it was out of a concern that being rather poor with summaries I might miss much that is essential to this Christian author’s explanation and give a negative impression of his work, in which case I will be doing him harm.

But in sum, his alternative interpretation is based out of close textual and cultural reading (he seems to be able to read the original language), and as I indicated in my post, he holds a Bible-believing Christian theistic worldview. One of his examples to show how God affirmed the female as much as he does the male was from Genesis where he revisited the stories of God creating man and woman up to Eve and Adam eating the apple and up to their being cursed and driven out of the Garden. He discussed how God not only cursed both Adam and Eve but interpreted the negative statements about the man to be more severe than those about the woman. He discusses how God selected and anointed women as writers and composers, and as rulers and prophetesses over those patriarchal societies thousands of years ago - thus demonstrating that he does not hate women.

He uses other passages of the Old Testament and brings in the New Testament passages that address the same issue. My understanding of his interpretive method is that he lays emphasis on the cultural context of the time; he tries to distinguish between prescriptive statements and descriptive ones, and between specific and general ones.  He obviously implies that people uncritically read today’s gender and cultural politics into texts of long ago. He rounds up with a statement that rather than God behaving badly to women, it is the Church that has behaved badly in its treatment of women.

/Femi



Sent: Thursday, July 9, 2020 4:22 PM

Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 10, 2020, 12:26:29 AM7/10/20
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I  thought that  Lamb commented on some of the 66 books of Isaiah, in particular. 

I believe in intensive  textual  reading  of individual books but It so happens that  this is a different type of Bible reading. Recall the specific books that I cited in my post - but thanks for your comments.

GE



On Jul 9, 2020, at 11:26 PM, Femi Kolapo <kol...@uoguelph.ca> wrote:



segun ogungbemi

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Jul 10, 2020, 9:23:56 AM7/10/20
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"i think of religious discourse as human--not divine." Ken. 
I agree with you Ken because the divine is pure and moral. That is why he cannot be associated with impurities of humans. As Jeremiah says, "The heart of man is desperately wicked and who can know it." Jeremiah is addressing human nature and not the totality of human behavior. 
Segun Ogungbemi. 

Okechukwu Ukaga

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Jul 10, 2020, 12:04:09 PM7/10/20
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"...he tries to   distinguish between prescriptive statements and descriptive ones, and between specific and general ones."   -Femi
This is a very important perspective, and often missing in the discussions and commentaries. For instance, we know to NOT condemn a weather forecaster for telling us about inclement weather, and not to condemn a war reporter for describing horrific consequences of battles. After neither the weather forecaster nor the war reporter is responsible for any bad news they share. But we often fail to apply similar logic when for example we read texts where a prophet foretells an eminent problem or describes a prevailing bad condition.
OU



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Okechukwu Ukaga, MBA, PhD
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University of Minnesota Extension Southeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Jul 10, 2020, 12:38:59 PM7/10/20
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When the war reporter actually endorses and recommends torture or provides a handbook for
torture, you should actually recoil in disgust.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU



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"...he tries to   distinguish between prescriptive statements and descriptive ones, and between specific and general ones."   -Femi

Cornelius Hamelberg

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Jul 10, 2020, 2:59:58 PM7/10/20
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 Professor Segun Ogungbemi,

By “religious discourse”, I presume that both you and Ken mean prophecy, the-word-of-God, and the inspired word-of-God scriptures, theology, preachments, religious commentaries, teachings…

You say that “the divine is pure and moral. That is why he cannot be associated with impurities of humans. As Jeremiah says, "The heart of man is desperately wicked and who can know it." Jeremiah is addressing human nature and not the totality of human behavior.”

 As Jeremiah knows there’s always room for teshuva

Christian believers find the meeting of the Divine and the Human in the person Jesus, truly human and truly divine. For the Christian believer, it is the sinless man, the Lord and saviour Jesus Christ as the son of God, i.e. God in human form that taught the morality known as the Sermon on the Mount.

What are we to say about the morality that is mediated in human language, through man (e.g. the Prophet Moses) and legislated as “the word of God”, such as The Ten Commandments?

Does your opinion that “Jeremiah is addressing human nature and not the totality of human behavior” not leave an opening for some  not wholly corrupted human nature or human behaviour and the possibility for some holy, middle ground where the human is inspired by the divine, such as what we observe here: INSIDE THE TEMPLE OF A GHANAIAN SPIRITUALIST!!!


Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 11, 2020, 2:19:52 PM7/11/20
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If there was one God that created this planet earth and everything in it, He/she must be able to speak every ethnic language on earth. Therefore, if He/She has any message for all mankind, He/She should send it to each ethnic group on earth in the language into which He/She has created them respectively. The original question posed by Rabbi Hamelberg concerning reparations to the descendants of victims of slavery was : Why should people who never owned slaves give money to people who were never slaves? The history of the enslavement of Africans by Judo/Christian/Islam faiths is well recorded and payment of reparations or not should be premised on those historical facts.

The response of Mr. Okechukwu Ukaga was direct in point when he justified reparations on the ground that people do inherit the assets and liabilities of their forefathers. Although slavery has been modernised it is still in practice by the inheritors and benefactors of enslaved Africans. And there comes my demand that slavery in its modern form should first be stopped totally before raising question of reparations to the African victims of slavery. Instead of strategising on how to stop slavery as it now affects Africans one is being inundated with what Isaiah said or did. Isaiah, like all the acclaimed prophets in the Bible and Quran, was not an African and he spoke no African language. God could not have sent messages to Africans through people who were illiterates in African ethnic languages. The same year 1857 when the US Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott vs. Sandford held that a Blackman has no rights that a Whiteman need respect, George D. Armstrong, a Doctor of Divinity and a Pastor of the Presbyterian Church, published a book titled:  Christian Doctrine of Slavery in which he quoted verses in the Bible to justify the enslavement of the Blackman. Two years later, 1859, another Doctor of Divinity, Reverend Fred. A. Ross published the book, Slavery ordained Of God in reference to the enslavement of the Blackman. Let us forget about the Bible and the Quran and let us discuss how to stop slavery as it affects us, Black Africans.
S. Kadiri  


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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 12, 2020, 9:23:52 PM7/12/20
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Hi Ken.

There is another reading of Isaac's sacrifice which parallels Yoruba culture: the Moremi myth

Both represent a period when Child immolation was common ( yes for sacrificial purposes) and a transition to a period when this was stopped.

OAA



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-------- Original message --------
From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <har...@msu.edu>
Date: 09/07/2020 14:24 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :

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hi gloria
i know it wasn't i whom you asked, but if i can throw a couple of ideas into this.
jihad, in islam. the common conception, and a common usage, is holy war often pitched as war against unbelievers.
the higher spiritual sense: struggle, especially within yourself, against your own sinful inclinations.
the mahabharata and ramayana, struggle-war between two factions, with krishna engaged in the war. but it is a mythic war and the figures represent higher spiritual values; the war is only a metaphor for struggle.

maybe one last example, the most difficult for me, in a sense. abraham's sacrifice of isaac. the central event in judaism and islam, and reconfigured, christianity.
for jews and muslims, cast as the test of abraham's faith. but the entire edifice evokes a world of sacrifice, not one of child killing. sacrifice is central to all three religions i mentioned and to african religions. and it reaches out to bridge the spaces between the divine or spiritual realms and the human.
as in, Death and the King's Horseman; something more than a literal killing or death or suicide.

maybe the questions posed here might be, what if you don't believe in this spiritual realm; don't believe in the workings of sacrifice, don't believe ikemifuma ever should have been killed, or christ or isaac or those killed to accompany the pharaoh, or that the king's horseman would have served a higher purpose if only his will had not been subverted by doubts.

these events can enrich us; or they can be used to diminish us. nowadays i see pretty much only diminished understandings and debased acts using religion as an excuse for power, but it need not all be taken that way.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


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Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 12, 2020, 9:52:35 PM7/12/20
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hi olayinka
i don't understand why you say "another." anyway, in judaism, it is the usual, accepted interpretation. i tried to stretch this a bit, and see in it a forerunner for christ's sacrifice, and as i said, it is viewed as a central story (mythos?) of judaism and islam.
the parallel to moremi is interesting. isn't that the soyinka play theme in the strong breed?
lots of sacrifice stories; i wonder if gloria could edify us about this motif in egyptian mythology?
ken

kenneth harrow

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michigan state university

517 803-8839

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Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - To In Excelsis Gloria :
 

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 13, 2020, 5:27:28 PM7/13/20
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You guessed right in your connection with Egyptian mythology and the writers of the New Testament.  I stretched the link further in my translation of Duro Ladipo's play by the eponymous name of the heroine  Moremi seeing the assassinated Nigerian president  Aare Abiola as an incarnate Christ like figure and  incarnation of Oluorogbo or Ela ( Moremi's sacrificial son)

Èlà as you may know is the divination godhead piece in the Ifá divination string ( òpèlè)

Yes, writers of the New Testament deliberately syncretised the Osiris myth with the Abrahamic myth of Isaac in projecting the Christ- sacrificial image of Jesus the son of God the father and the Trinity was fashioned on the trinity of Osiris, Isis  and Horus their son( of course you know the New Testament was compiled and completed in Egypt so the ambient myth was not accidental.)  Plus Jesus's ( well I prefer to call him his real given name Emmanuel with its Egyptian provenance) early life was in part in Egypt as his parents fled the wrath of King Herod.


OAA



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hi olayinka
i don't understand why you say "another." anyway, in judaism, it is the usual, accepted interpretation. i tried to stretch this a bit, and see in it a forerunner for christ's sacrifice, and as i said, it is viewed as a central story (mythos?) of judaism and islam.
the parallel to moremi is interesting. isn't that the soyinka play theme in the strong breed?
lots of sacrifice stories; i wonder if gloria could edify us about this motif in egyptian mythology?
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu


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Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 13, 2020, 6:32:16 PM7/13/20
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dear olayinka
many years ago, when i taught western humanities, i read up on scholarship concerning christianity, and read and used bultman's famous  Primitive Christianity.
christianity was created by the confluence of lots lots lots of faiths from the eastern meditrerranean region, not just one. it's old scholarship, but i bet it is still relatively true
ken

kenneth harrow

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517 803-8839

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Sent: Monday, July 13, 2020 5:19 PM

Gloria Emeagwali

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Jul 13, 2020, 9:07:40 PM7/13/20
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OA,
I agree with your  analysis. They also syncretized the Virgin Auset ( called Isis by the Greeks) with Mary.  Auset had an immaculate conception in giving birth to Heru (Horus).

 Well that rebel snake Sata of the Egyptians was mentioned some time ago, although I am surprised that they settled for Sata and not the most dangerous of all Egyptian snakes, Apophis.

Note that angels have wings like birds. Is that the hawk  or falcon deity
and sky god Heru , that is at play here? 

GE

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On Jul 13, 2020, at 5:27 PM, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:


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