Chielozona Eze
Carleton College, Africana Studies, Faculty Member
Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa seems well positioned to evaluate the successes or failures of Africa as a continent of liberated people. Nearly all analyses of African liberation movements have rightly highlighted the... more
Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa seems well positioned to evaluate the successes or failures of Africa as a continent of liberated people. Nearly all analyses of African liberation movements have rightly highlighted the glories of decolonisation; very few have stressed its pitfalls. This article examines the negative moral consequences of certain philosophical assumptions of the African decolonisation process. Of particular interest in this inquiry is the frame of mind of African actors of decolonisation who eventually became the political and intellectual leaders of their countries. How might we conceive of the African moral subject within the contexts both of decolonisation and as a member of the global community in the twenty-first century? What, if anything, can Africa learn from the missteps of the decolonisation process?
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Finding beauty in otherness: The issue therefore is no longer how different we are from others, but rather what we can learn from them, from what we have in common with them. This implies a conscious effort to affirm something in others... more
Finding beauty in otherness: The issue therefore is no longer how different we are from others, but rather what we can learn from them, from what we have in common with them. This implies a conscious effort to affirm something in others and to seek to relate to them. Let it be the starting point of encounter. The first question Afropolitans ask when they encounter other people is: what do I (or can I) have in common with this person? The next question is: what is beautiful or admirable in this other? The third is: what can I learn from this person? By the time they have answered all these questions, the issue of how they are different from that person would have taken care of itself. Difference becomes merely a reference point of individuality and respect rather than a point of exclusion of the other.
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The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa’s response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for... more
The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa’s response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society?
This paper is a reflection on Mandela’s rhetoric of empathy and its moral-political implications with specific regard to the difficult transition period from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. It argues that Mandela employed a... more
This paper is a reflection on Mandela’s rhetoric of empathy and its moral-political implications with specific regard to the difficult transition period from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. It argues that Mandela employed a deliberative and rational appeal to the riches of the human experience as a rallying point for the creation of a new society. The paper points to the critical lesson that though empathy is not a panacea for all the problems of a society, it can help establish conditions for progressive deliberations and conflict resolutions.
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The poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley acknowledged in an interview that her primary goal in poetry is to immortalize the suffering of her people. What exactly does she mean by that? What are the implications of remembering suffering, of keeping... more
The poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley acknowledged in an interview that her primary goal in poetry is to immortalize the suffering of her people. What exactly does she mean by that? What are the implications of remembering suffering, of keeping sorrows alive, especially in narratives? This article explores these questions in light of Primo Levi's envisaged moral obligation to bear testimony to the victims of the Jewish holocaust, as well as Giorgio Agamben's thoughts on that episode. I argue that ethics is central to Jabbeh Wesley's poetics. The poet has a calling: the moral responsibility to bear testimony to the dead and the dispossessed. I will discuss Jabbeh Wesley's poems as both a tribute to the dead and as an appeal to the living to change their lives. To situate my discussions of Jabbeh Wesley and Levi, I will revisit the ethical implications of Aristotle's definition of tragedy.
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Eze addresses slavery as a symbol of universal human rights abuse. Chika Unigwe’s novel, On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) tells the stories of four African women who work as sex slaves in Brussels. The story is a metaphor for the condition... more
Eze addresses slavery as a symbol of universal human rights abuse. Chika Unigwe’s novel, On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) tells the stories of four African women who work as sex slaves in Brussels. The story is a metaphor for the condition of women in Africa because it draws attention to the indignities inflicted on women’s bodies directly. Eze discusses sex slavery as an instance of global abuse of human rights.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Aesthetics
Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa seems well positioned to evaluate the successes or failures of Africa as a continent of liberated people. Nearly all analyses of African liberation movements have rightly highlighted the... more
Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa seems well positioned to evaluate the successes or failures of Africa as a continent of liberated people. Nearly all analyses of African liberation movements have rightly highlighted the glories of decolonisation; very few have stressed its pitfalls. This article examines the negative moral consequences of certain philosophical assumptions of the African decolonisation process. Of particular interest in this inquiry is the frame of mind of African actors of decolonisation who eventually became the political and intellectual leaders of their countries. How might we conceive of the African moral subject within the contexts both of decolonisation and as a member of the global community in the twenty-first century? What, if anything, can Africa learn from the missteps of the decolonisation process?
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Eze reads Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), which is a narrative of polygamy as an institution that inherently incapacitates women’s bodies, and Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly (2009), a collection of... more
Eze reads Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), which is a narrative of polygamy as an institution that inherently incapacitates women’s bodies, and Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly (2009), a collection of short stories set in Zimbabwe, as expressions of contemporary African women’s efforts to challenge the rigidity of African cultural and nationalist paradigms and gender relations. He argues that these narratives enhance awareness of human rights. “Abstractions as Disablers of Women’s Rights” demonstrates the danger of abstract consideration of the human person by highlighting the structure of individual narratives.
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Eze offers a profound introduction to the recent emphasis on the ethical in African literary and cultural discourses. Contemporary African women writers are no longer interested in writing back to the Empire; they write back to their... more
Eze offers a profound introduction to the recent emphasis on the ethical in African literary and cultural discourses. Contemporary African women writers are no longer interested in writing back to the Empire; they write back to their bodies. In narrating stories of women incapacitated by the ideologies of tradition and patriarchy, the writers demand that women be treated as ends, not as means to men’s ends. Eze proposes feminist empathy as a theoretical tool for understanding the writers’ works. Feminist empathy is the ability to feel oneself into the experience of a woman in unwarranted suffering, that is, suffering that resulted due to no fault of her own. Eze argues that these writings enact ways of being human; they script human rights.
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In Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, we are presented with an intriguing character, Ezeulu. In many instances, Ezeulu is portrayed as being ahead of his time. Among his special qualities is the ability to recognize, very much like the... more
In Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, we are presented with an intriguing character, Ezeulu. In many instances, Ezeulu is portrayed as being ahead of his time. Among his special qualities is the ability to recognize, very much like the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, that reality is in constant motion; the only thing that is stable is change. For Ezeulu, "the world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place" (45-46). The typical African mask performance is a display of different masquerades in the village square during festivals. In contrast with conventional Western theatre in which characters perform on stage and the members of the audience are seated, African masquerade performance involves movement of both actors and audience.
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This essay is based on the assumption that retributive justice fails to capture the immense riches of the human condition. Exploring the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), it argues that restorative justice must be... more
This essay is based on the assumption that retributive justice fails to capture the immense riches of the human condition. Exploring the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), it argues that restorative justice must be seen as complementary to the retributive and other conceptions of justice. Restorative justice is presented here as a spiritual journey, one that is best grasped through the prism of Benjamin’s spiritual elements of class struggles. Nelson Mandela understood, like Georg Friedrich Hegel, that even the Absolute Spirit, powerful as it is, achieves its goal through cunning. Spiritual quest is, however, much more than the cunning of the spirit; it is also love and human flourishing understood as inclusive projects.
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Eze focuses on the macro instances of human rights abuses in society as seen through the lens of the abuse of women and children. “Human Rights as Liberatory Social Thought” engages Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2004) and Swallow... more
Eze focuses on the macro instances of human rights abuses in society as seen through the lens of the abuse of women and children. “Human Rights as Liberatory Social Thought” engages Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2004) and Swallow (2010). Eze examines the breakdown in intersubjectivity between men and women as well as in society as a whole. It pays particular attention to the dignities of children and the rights of women as correlative to that in society. “Human Rights as Liberatory Social Thought” concludes by showing the connection between patriarchal abuses in the family and military abuses in society.
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It is common knowledge that the relationship between Africa and the West has been marked on the one hand, by exploitation and on the other by resistance to this. Africa’s resistance to the West has, in many instances muted into resentment... more
It is common knowledge that the relationship between Africa and the West has been marked on the one hand, by exploitation and on the other by resistance to this. Africa’s resistance to the West has, in many instances muted into resentment that has in turn created some forms of moral delusions, and cultural relativisms. There is a parallel between African-American resentment of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture and African resentment of European culture. To some degree, the one has influenced the other, and this has had tremendous effects on Africa’s perception of culture as homogenous whole.
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“The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses” underlines the imperative to bear witness not only to those examples of women’s suffering that are specific to cultural ideologies, but also to other forms of human rights abuse,... more
“The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses” underlines the imperative to bear witness not only to those examples of women’s suffering that are specific to cultural ideologies, but also to other forms of human rights abuse, especially those perpetrated during wars. Eze provides an analytical study of the poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who details human rights abuses during the brutal civil war in Liberia. “The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses” thus enhances the truth that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.
One feature of Nelson Mandela's legacy in South Africa is his concept of post-apartheid society as a cosmopolitan space. Sadly, recent developments in the country suggest a return to nativist and bigoted world views and cast a dark... more
One feature of Nelson Mandela's legacy in South Africa is his concept of post-apartheid society as a cosmopolitan space. Sadly, recent developments in the country suggest a return to nativist and bigoted world views and cast a dark shadow over his legacy. There is an urgent necessity to review this aspect of Mandela's vision. In so doing, this paper highlights the ethical advantages of cosmopolitanism, and argues that what sets Mandela's cosmopolitanism apart from others is his emphasis on empathy. I therefore suggest that empathetic cosmopolitanism is a particularly South African worldview. In support of this idea of empathetic cosmopolitanism, I discuss such recent theories as 'incompleteness', 'multiple identity', and 'entanglement', suggested by South African thinkers, as registers of Mandela's global citizenship. 1. Introduction The world greeted the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa as a unique phenomenon and viewed ...