Saturday, April 30, 2011

USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: ECDC-CARI conference:Ethiopian Development Community-Council – Centre for African Refugees and Immigrants, www.ecdc-cari.org

Yes, it is time to go after the West's darlings!!!

Saturday, April 30, 2011

 

Dear participant of the ECDC-CARI conference:

 

March4Freedom is a civic organisation seeking to contribute to the empowerment of Ethiopians in Ethiopia and abroad to exercise their human rights and rights as citizens and to bring the world attention to the gross human rights abuses, tyranny and oppression of Ethiopians under the current brutal government.  

 

We are concerned and disappointed that you have chosen to share the stage with Ethiopian Ambassador Girma Birru on the conference organised by ECDC-CARI (Ethiopian Development Community-Council – Centre for African Refugees and Immigrants, www.ecdc-cari.org ) to take place on 2-4 May 2011 in Arlington, VA. The Ethiopian government, which Mr. Birru represents in the U.S., is an autocratic dictatorship, with the current ruler, Meles Zenawi, having been in power for the last 20 years, ever since seizing power following the overthrow of a previous dictatorship.

 

Under Mr. Zenawi's rule, several devastating massacres and mass killings have been committed by the ruling TPLF (Tigray People's Liberation Front), the party leading the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front). These mass violations of human rights, deaths of innocent civilians, and distruction of poor farmers' livelihoods have been very well documented in the international media such as BBC, New York Times, and many other outlets, by reputed human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and by the annual U.S. Department of State's Human Rights Report. The mass killings of Ethiopian civilians, including the least powerful in society such as impoverished pastoralists and farmers and the urban poor, include the 2003 massacre of a small remote ethnic group, the Anuak (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4379119.stm [1]), the mass rape of women and children and destruction of livestock of the pastoralists in the Ogaden region (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/world/asia/17iht-addis.4.6177525.html ), and the arbitrary murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters in Addis Abeba and the detention and mistreatment of 40,000 in remote malaria infested camps following a rigged election (http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGAFR250192005 , http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/04/ethiopia ). In addition to well-documented large scale atrocities, the Ethiopian dictatorship has engaged in tight control over the population through party leaders of local cells at the sub-village level, eliminated all free press, and tortured NGO workers, human rights advocates, and opposition leaders.

 

But most relevant of all in the context of this conference: Due to the severe repression by Mr. Zenawi's government, there have been floods of refugees out of Ethiopia in all directions seeking protection from imprisonment, physical abuse or the threat of being killed for the political beliefs they hold or their exercise of their inalienable human rights. Refugees include the Anuak in the Gambella region who have fled to Sudan, Ogadeni Ethiopians who fled to neighbouring Somalia, and masses of human rights defenders who seek refuge in various parts of Africa, Europe, and North America. It strikes us thus as ironic and insulting of all refugees, that the pro-government ECDC-CARI organisation invites the representative of the Ethiopian government, to speak on the plight of refugees. But most of all, we are deeply troubled that ECDC-CARI has succeeded in bringing your respected organisation on board onto the forum together with Mr. Birru, lending him and his government an air of legitimacy to speak with moral authority on the topic, a legitimacy he does not have for the reasons mentioned above. While the also invited South African ambassador represents a free and democratic country which does not brutalise its own people, and does not generate a vast flood of refugees out its country due to repressive tactics, obviously the same can't be said of Mr. Birru and the government he represents.

 

It may be that you were not aware that you would be speaking on the same platform with Mr. Birru, or it may be that you were not aware of the drastic refugee problems due to the Ethiopian government massacres—although the latter is unlikely given the well-documented nature of the Ethiopian dictatorship. We want to let you know about our concern regarding your appearance with the Ethiopian government on this forum and the fact that you did not steer clear of this unsalutary association, at a time when, in light of the subjugation of citizens across North Africa and the Middle East, respected and legitimate countries and organisations have become more sensitive about actions which may inappropriately connect them to brutal and repressive regimes.

 

We would be more than happy to discuss this with you, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at the below contact information.

 

Yours sincerely

 

 

Mekdese Kassa, Pharm.D.                                                         Kassa Ayalew, M.D., M.P.H

March4Freedom                                                                         March4Freedom 

 

1218 Missouri Avenue, NW,

Office # 3

Washington, DC 2011

ContactMarch4Freedom.org

Phone: 202-656-8070

Joinus@march4freedom.org

 

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

cc:

All participants of the ECDC-CARI conference



[1] The references in this letter are only few selected ones, but the amount of evidence is vast and is easily accessible through the internet sites of the relevant media and rights organisations.

RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - burkina story in times

Mwalimu Harrow, we are working very hard for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Burkina Faso that will lead to substantive reforms. Please keep your fingers crossed.
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 4/30/2011 9:25:46 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - burkina story in times

Protesters Demand President's Ouster in Burkina Faso

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — A whiff of North African-style protest came to this sun-baked sub-Saharan capital on Saturday as about a thousand demonstrators descended on a central square to demand the departure of President Blaise Compaoré, who has held power for 24 years in one of the world's poorest countries.

A popular reggae tune, "Quitte le Pouvoir!" or "Give Up Power," the jaunty anthem of African protesters, alternated with a variation of the slogan used in Tunisia four months before: "Blaise, give it up!" Some protesters held up signs comparing Mr. Compaoré, a former army captain who has been regularly re-elected with 80 percent of the vote, to the ousted Tunisian ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Politicians from many of the country's 34 opposition parties joined local pop music stars in a demonstration that lasted for hours under a blazing sun. They condemned Mr. Compaoré's lengthy rule and accused him of corruption and patronage politics. Trucks of friendly soldiers waved to the protesters, many of them young people.

The demonstration came on the heels of two months of ferment among the usually quiet population, as students, soldiers, merchants and most recently the police have all taken to the streets to protest high prices, low wages and Mr. Compaoré's undivided rule in a country that is ninth from the bottom on the United Nations' Human Development Index.

A political crisis in neighboring Ivory Coast — which landlocked Burkina Faso depends on for food shipments — has forced up living costs, adding to the unrest.

The previous protests have been violent, with soldiers rampaging through the capital and provincial cities earlier in April, looting and burning offices of Mr. Compaoré's ruling party, and even co-opting his elite presidential guard. The ruler, who seized power in a 1987 coup, has been shaken: he has dismissed his government, named a former journalist as his new prime minister and met with army officers — he did so on Friday — to promise better pay.

Those measures did not impress Saturday's fist-waving crowd, assembled in a giant asphalt plaza. "Since Blaise Compaoré took power, by the method that you know" — and the crowd shouted "murder, murder!" — "there's a tiny minority that has robbed and pillaged, while the majority has stagnated in misery," said Tahirou Barry of the National Renaissance Party.

"The people are fed up! The soldiers are fed up! The students are fed up! The shopkeepers are fed up!" yelled Norbert Tiendrebeogo of the Social Forces Front. The crowd cheered a local rap star, S'Mockey, when he yelled: "The problem is, it's not a democracy. It's been tropicalized."

Still, the heterogeneous nature of the protest's organizers, including politicians from several dozen different parties, points to the central problem of the opposition, in the view of analysts: it is deeply divided after years of Mr. Compaoré's rule.

"I'd be very surprised if the Compaoré regime collapses," said Pierre Englebert, a political scientist at Pomona College and a Burkina Faso expert. "At the core of his regime, he's repressive. But he handles things with a certain distance. You can be corrupted. He'll let steam off."

Among the opposition's strongest cards are the unsolved killings of two popular men: Thomas Sankara, Mr. Compaoré's predecessor and army comrade, who was killed during the 1987 coup that he helped lead; and Norbert Zongo, a crusading journalist who was killed in 1998 while he was looking into the Compaoré family's finances. There were frequent references to the two men on Saturday.

The high price of rice was also a focus of complaints. "Life has just become too hard," said Moussa Lingani, a printer. Rice, he said, was now over $40 a bag.

"I haven't eaten in two days," said Remy Kafando, a farmer. "To eat, it's just hard. We want a complete change. We don't want anymore of this. We're ready for civil war."

--  kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Peeling Away Multiple Masks - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable - Review

Still on the Malcolm X movie and the ridiculous "Malcolm X was "gay
for pay" - my last word on it:

Yes,Laurence Fishburne's a great actor, and talking about gender
choice and all that, now that every despised minority is trying to
claim Malcolm, it was a soul sister Scotti Preston who told me ( in an
art gallery at Slussen, Stockholm) that she would have preferred the
manly and charismatic Larry playing Malcolm X, that role of honour &
representing black masculinity, black sexuality, courage and defiance
etc. Later on he was OK as Othello. Her choice does not in any way
diminish DW's talents, although the kind of baggage that actors come
with on and off screen can sometimes - some of their earlier roles -
can add to the predicament; certainly no one would like to have seen
Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy or latterly Chris Rock, playing
Malcolm, since Malcolm was not a comedian.

The whole of the Stockholm African Diaspora was at the première
( both curly hair and the straight blow outs) and we were talking
about the movie for weeks after that, both those who had read the
autobiography and those who had not.

A good opening question here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DmLbb5eqno

About the most improbable and most malicious "Malcolm X was "gay-for-
pay" bit , obviously the man is bigger than life in so many spheres,
is all things to all people and here to add to super black man
Malcolm's political & sexual hagiography it could dismay you to read
this kind of nutty question: " Is Obama the secret son of Malcolm X?"

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Israpundit%3A+Obama+is+Malcolm+X%27s++son%3F&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=


On Apr 29, 11:08 pm, Tracy Flemming <cafenegrit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And yet another that first appeared in gbmnews.com by Rev. Irene
> Monroe:http://gbmnews.com/wp/?p=7550
>
> Malcolm X was "gay-for-pay"
>
> Before any of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
> communities laud Malcolm X as our new gay icon or castigate him for
> being a black heterosexist nationalist on the "down low," we might
> need to closely examine the recent revelation that for a period in his
> life Malcolm X engaged in same-sex relationships.
>
> Also, before any of us in the African American community flatly
> dismiss these assertions as part and parcel of a racist conspiratorial
> propaganda machine that is out to discredit our brother Malcolm, we
> need, at least, to hear these nagging claims.
>
> And this time hear them coming from one of our own — Manning Marable,
> a renowned and respected African American historian and social critic
> from Columbia University.
>
> Sadly, Marable died April 1, just days before the release of his
> magnum opus, an exhaustive and new 594-page biography Malcolm X: A
> Life of Reinvention, on April 4th, which also marks the anniversary of
> Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.
>
> His assertions in the book — deriving from meticulously combing
> through 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of
> Information Act, records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State
> Department and New York district attorney's office, as well as his
> interviews with members of Malcolm X's inner circle and security team
> — leaves the reader in shock and awe.
>
> For those of us who always thought Malcolm X's assassination, as with
> King's, had everything to do with J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I, we are
> correct. Marable emphatically states that both the F.B.I and NYPD had
> advance knowledge of Malcolm X's assassination plot, and did nothing
> to abort it.
>
> But what will come as a shock is Marable's assertions that the Malcolm
> X the world has come to know through Alex Haley's 1965 New York
> Timesbestseller The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Spike Lee's 1992
> filmMalcolm X based largely on Haley's book is fictive. And the spin
> we have, in part, is due to Malcolm himself.
>
> In creating an autobiographical narrative that would have his book fly
> off of bookshelves as well as elevate his status to a national — if
> not world — stage, Malcolm X intentionally fabricated, exaggerated,
> glossed over, and omitted vital facts about his life. One such fact
> omitted was his same-sex relationship with a white businessman.
>
> The claim, no doubt, will become a hotly contested topic in sectors of
> the African American community. With an iconography of racist images
> of black masculinity ranging from back in the day as Sambos, Uncle
> Toms, coons, and bucks to now gangsta hip-hoppers, Malcolm represented
> the negation of them.
>
> As a pop-culture hero to young black males of this generation and as
> the quintessential representation of black manhood of both America's
> Black Civil Rights and Black Power eras, a gay Malcolm X will be a
> hard, if not impossible, sell to the African American community.
>
> And here's why:
>
> At Malcolm X's funeral, held at the Faith Temple Church Of God in
> February 27, 1965, Ossie Davis, renowned African American actor and
> civil rights activist, delivered the eulogy stating the following:
>
> Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes. …
> Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his
> meaning to his people. …And we will know him then for what he was and
> is. A prince. Our own black shining prince who didn't hesitate to die
> because he loved us so.
>
> For a gangsta hip-hop generation Malcolm Little — before his
> conversation to the Nation of Islam and name change — represents for
> them a lauded hypermasculinity. And their male-dominated musical genre
> is aesthetically built on the most misogynistic and homophobic strains
> of Black Nationalism and afrocentricism.
>
> But this claim by Marable, however, of Malcolm's same-sex relationship
> is not new. Reports of Malcolm X's queerness was first revealed in
> Bruce Perry's 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed
> Black America.
>
> According to Perry, Malcolm's same-sex dalliances date back to
> childhood where he enjoyed being masturbated or fellated. In his 20s,
> Perry informs us, Malcolm had a sustained sexual relationship with a
> transvestite named Willie Mae, and also he had sex with gay men for
> money, boasting he serviced "queers."
>
> I am not heterosexist apologist, but if we, as LGBTQ, use this era of
> Malcolm's life to claim him as gay, we misunderstand the art and
> survival of street hustling culture.
>
> Similarly, if we, as African Americans, use this era of Malcolm's life
> to dismiss that he engaged in same-sex relationships, many will miss
> the opportunity to purge ourselves of homophobic attitudes.
>
> When Malcolm came to Boston to live with his older half-sister,
> Roxbury's Ella Little Collins, he was 16, having dropped out of school
> at 15. With no job skills and looking for the most expedient route to
> acquire money, Malcolm peddled cocaine, broke into homes of Boston's
> well-to-do, gambled big at poker games, and unabashedly serviced gay
> men for pay.
>
> While it can be argued that Malcolm's same-sex encounters were not
> solely financially motivated, let us also not dismiss that the only
> evidence we do have is the context in which he was.
>
> Short URL:http://gbmnews.com/wp/?p=7550

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - This Is Wrong -- I Hope That We Afrikans Will Fight Back In Other Ways

It is plain wrong to kill a person's son and grandchildren because you hate that person.

Libya: Gadhafi Survives NATO Airstirke

The ruins of a house Libya says was the  site of a NATO missile attack in Tripoli
Photo: AP / Darko Bandic

In this photo taken on a government organized tour, officials and members of the media inspect the ruins of a house Libya says was the site of a NATO missile attack in Tripoli, Saturday, April 30, 2011.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has survived an apparent NATO airstrike that killed one of his sons and three grandchildren.

Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim announced the deaths in a Saturday news conference. He said 29-year-old Saif al-Arab Gadhafi and the grandchildren were killed during what he called a direct attempt to assassinate the Libyan leader.  Ibrahim described the younger Gadhafi as a student.

Ibrahim says Mr. Gadhafi and his wife were in their son's home at the time but were not injured.  However, he said several other people at the home were hurt.

Also, reporters were taken to the site of the home, where they saw extensive damage.

There was no immediate reaction from NATO. However, as word of the apparent strike spread across Libya, celebratory gunfire was heard in the rebel stronghold, Benghazi.

Earlier Saturday, NATO rejected an offer from Mr. Gadhafi for negotiations to end the conflict in his country.

A NATO official said Saturday NATO wants to see "actions not words." He said the Libyan government has announced ceasefires several times before only to continue attacking civilians.  The official said NATO operations will continue as long as civilians in Libya are threatened.

Libyan rebels also rejected Mr. Gadhafi's call for talks saying the time for compromise has passed.  

Mr. Gadhafi said in an hour-and-a-half long televised speech on Saturday that he was ready for negotiations provided that NATO stop its attacks, but he said would not step down from power.

Libya says NATO bombed a site near the national broadcast offices while Mr. Gadhafi was inside delivering his address.  The Libyan government says the bombing shows allied forces are specifically targeting Mr. Gadhafi.

Also Saturday, NATO said it is working to clear anti-ship mines laid by pro-Gadhafi forces in the harbor of the rebel-held city of Misrata.  

NATO operations commander Brigadier Rob Weighill said the alliance intercepted several small boats laying mines on Friday.  He said the incident shows what he called Mr. Gadhafi's complete disregard for international law by trying to keep humanitarian aid from being delivered to civilians.

Several aid ships have not been able to arrive in the port because of the threat of mines.  The port is the only lifeline for the city of 300,000, which has been under siege for two months.

USA Africa Dialogue Series - BBC E-mail: French Football suspends official

Sulaiman saw this story on the BBC News website and thought you
should see it.

** French Football suspends official **
The French Football Federation's national technical director is suspended after claims of a secret racial quota for trainees.
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/world-europe-13236864 >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/email >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - burkina story in times

Protesters Demand President’s Ouster in Burkina Faso

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — A whiff of North African-style protest came to this sun-baked sub-Saharan capital on Saturday as about a thousand demonstrators descended on a central square to demand the departure of President Blaise Compaoré, who has held power for 24 years in one of the world’s poorest countries.

A popular reggae tune, “Quitte le Pouvoir!” or “Give Up Power,” the jaunty anthem of African protesters, alternated with a variation of the slogan used in Tunisia four months before: “Blaise, give it up!” Some protesters held up signs comparing Mr. Compaoré, a former army captain who has been regularly re-elected with 80 percent of the vote, to the ousted Tunisian ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Politicians from many of the country’s 34 opposition parties joined local pop music stars in a demonstration that lasted for hours under a blazing sun. They condemned Mr. Compaoré’s lengthy rule and accused him of corruption and patronage politics. Trucks of friendly soldiers waved to the protesters, many of them young people.

The demonstration came on the heels of two months of ferment among the usually quiet population, as students, soldiers, merchants and most recently the police have all taken to the streets to protest high prices, low wages and Mr. Compaoré’s undivided rule in a country that is ninth from the bottom on the United Nations’ Human Development Index.

A political crisis in neighboring Ivory Coast — which landlocked Burkina Faso depends on for food shipments — has forced up living costs, adding to the unrest.

The previous protests have been violent, with soldiers rampaging through the capital and provincial cities earlier in April, looting and burning offices of Mr. Compaoré’s ruling party, and even co-opting his elite presidential guard. The ruler, who seized power in a 1987 coup, has been shaken: he has dismissed his government, named a former journalist as his new prime minister and met with army officers — he did so on Friday — to promise better pay.

Those measures did not impress Saturday’s fist-waving crowd, assembled in a giant asphalt plaza. “Since Blaise Compaoré took power, by the method that you know” — and the crowd shouted “murder, murder!” — “there’s a tiny minority that has robbed and pillaged, while the majority has stagnated in misery,” said Tahirou Barry of the National Renaissance Party.

“The people are fed up! The soldiers are fed up! The students are fed up! The shopkeepers are fed up!” yelled Norbert Tiendrebeogo of the Social Forces Front. The crowd cheered a local rap star, S’Mockey, when he yelled: “The problem is, it’s not a democracy. It’s been tropicalized.”

Still, the heterogeneous nature of the protest’s organizers, including politicians from several dozen different parties, points to the central problem of the opposition, in the view of analysts: it is deeply divided after years of Mr. Compaoré’s rule.

“I’d be very surprised if the Compaoré regime collapses,” said Pierre Englebert, a political scientist at Pomona College and a Burkina Faso expert. “At the core of his regime, he’s repressive. But he handles things with a certain distance. You can be corrupted. He’ll let steam off.”

Among the opposition’s strongest cards are the unsolved killings of two popular men: Thomas Sankara, Mr. Compaoré’s predecessor and army comrade, who was killed during the 1987 coup that he helped lead; and Norbert Zongo, a crusading journalist who was killed in 1998 while he was looking into the Compaoré family’s finances. There were frequent references to the two men on Saturday.

The high price of rice was also a focus of complaints. “Life has just become too hard,” said Moussa Lingani, a printer. Rice, he said, was now over $40 a bag.

“I haven’t eaten in two days,” said Remy Kafando, a farmer. “To eat, it’s just hard. We want a complete change. We don’t want anymore of this. We’re ready for civil war.”

--  kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Siona O'Connell & Natasha Himmelman's "Lessons in continued oppression"

Lessons in continued oppression

SIONA O'CONNELL AND NATASHA HIMMELMAN: COMMENT - Apr 29 2011 15:22

We write as part of a collective of students who oppose the so-called disestablishment of the Centre for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

On February 13 this year the collective, Concerned CAS Students, released a statement titled "Does Post-apartheid UCT Need a Centre for African Studies?". In response, the dean of humanities emailed us a document titled "New Initiatives in the Faculty of Humanities: Discussion Document on Departmental Mergers". She also scheduled time to meet us and invited us to attend a February 25 faculty forum discussion on the matter.

From the document she sent us, it became apparent that discussions leading to the proposed merger had been under way for more than five years. Because Concerned CAS Students had criticised the administration's lack of transparency and hoped to gain a stronger grasp of the faculty's five years of conversation, we decided to be transparent and speak out at the faculty forum, which we did. 

Despite this, UCT vice-chancellor Max Price made no mention of the faculty forum or our statements in his response ("No threat to African centre", March 18) to David Macfarlane's story on CAS's disestablishment ("UCT in war over 'bantu education'", March 11). Rather, he chose to dismiss us -- students, stakeholders and indeed citizens of UCT -- as "an anonymous group of students".

His decision to refer to us in this way speaks volumes. After all, a different approach was available to him. He could have used the questions we raised in the forum and elsewhere as an opportunity to recognise UCT's complex history.

This could have entailed not only celebrating its interventions against apartheid but also confronting its complicity in the apartheid regime; it could have acknowledged both its struggle against and its perpetuation of racial and gender oppression.

What does it mean when history places an institution in the "right"? Does this suggest it can stop pushing the boundaries, thereby putting its energy into establishing itself in an unjust system that has yet to be structurally dismantled? In the post-apartheid moment in which we live, and given the context of UCT's history, what does UCT's failure to recognise us as citizens of this "Afropolitan" university mean? Inspired by this week's celebration of Freedom Day, we would like to reflect on the "freedom" that UCT offers post-apartheid South Africa. 

Power
The freedom experienced on April 27 1994 was one in which we exercised our right to power as citizens of South Africa. By voting we asserted ourselves as fully fledged human beings and denied a systematically institutionalised culture of absence -- a culture in which we, as physical beings, were present but as empty signs; we signified nothingness. 

Despite our best efforts to extricate ourselves from this power structure, no amount of education or money has been able fully to eradicate the continued denial of our value as human beings. Time and again some of us find that who we are -- our histories, pasts, memories -- are disavowed.

UCT is no different, for we struggle to find ourselves valued here; we struggle not to become entrenched in particular ways of being and thinking in the world. Are we being educated to deny who we are and where we come from to uphold deep-rooted power structures that oppress us?

How else are we to interpret the deafening inaction from those in positions of power at UCT? Where is the deep historical commitment to the study of Africa and to meaningful transformation? Why do authority figures at UCT dismiss student concerns? And why are they unwilling to inform and engage with us about what we as a community think the study of Africa at UCT should -- indeed, could -- look like?

Are these well-respected scholars not our role models? If so, is the system they uphold through their silence, their uncommunicativeness and their active unknowing meant to be our aspiration for the new South Africa? What sacrifices are they making to satisfy UCT's representational democracy? Is this our future? What does it mean to be recognised as an absence at UCT? What other persons and groups are so absented? Whose interests does performing a culture of absence serve?

Citizenship
As students we value our UCT education. We see it as important, but what does a UCT education really mean? Access? Power? Money? Respect? Knowledge? Those of us who are invested in education as a way to access power know that a UCT education is meant to recode us in a way that enables us to assert our value as contributing citizens. However, what happens when the educational institution through which we seek to exert and express our citizenship makes us "anonymous" and absent?

This dismissal of us engenders and perpetuates a deep sense of not belonging: how can one feel at home in a space that denies one's value as a member of a community that already disavows one's histories, pasts and memories?

Although UCT confers degrees that are undeniably reflective of hard work and of knowledge gained, students and graduates are left to reconcile their educational accomplishments with the violences perpetrated against us in the name of education. As graduates of an institution that systematically denies its history and refuses to do the necessary hard work, we in turn learn to deny and become complicit in upholding a superstructure in which we can participate only as empty signs.

In this way, UCT produces citizens who think, imagine and exist in ways that reinforce the very dominant power that oppresses us. In doing so, the university fails to take advantage of a unique opportunity to imagine other ways of being in post-apartheid South Africa and the world.

UCT does not offer us lessons in how to exercise our freedom in the new South Africa. Rather, it reaffirms "a deep institutional conservatism" (the vice-chancellor's phrase) in which power organises itself as "free-dom": domination and imperial freedom. Our degrees teach us that we are not free at all.

Freedom
Flawed as it might be, for us CAS is freedom. Learning with and through our histories, the centre challenges us to imagine critically new possibilities and ways of being.

Undergraduate students describe CAS courses as "astonishing", "eye-opening", "enlightening". The courses advocate what one student calls a "different way of thinking" that, as another student explains, "gave me a broader view of the life we live in and the history of what got us to where we are".

Centralising African voices -- the voices of our intellectuals, politicians, artists and activists -- CAS confronts a culture of absence, preparing us for the hard work that the new South Africa requires so that we do not repeat history's mistakes. It is this freedom that we do not want to lose. This is what the disestablishment of CAS means for us.

In our February 25 faculty forum statement we acknowledged the seeming inevitability of the proposed "New School for Critical Enquiry in Africa", which would merge CAS with the departments of social anthropology and linguistics and, possibly, the African Gender Institute. We urged UCT and the humanities faculty to make its imagined new school the best that it can offer.

We are confident that the best UCT can offer is not an institutional fiat that threatens not only the study of Africa but also established disciplines such as anthropology and linguistics. 

Indeed, there is no question that UCT can provide the space -- practical, transdisciplinary and disciplinary -- that professors require in order to perform the job for which they have been hired. Moreover, in an institution in which 70% of all professors are white men, UCT must do more to offer rigorous support to train, recruit, employ and promote scholars whose expertise and experiences reflect the incredibly varied and heterogeneous spectrum of South African society.

The recently established Institute for Humanities in Africa demonstrates clearly that the university can do better. But why does UCT choose to support this and other new research projects and intellectual spaces seemingly at the expense of others?

UCT needs to do the hard work necessary to re-imagine critically complex scholarly traditions that implicate us in unspeakable violences. As one of the Concerned CAS Students has pointed out, the bar has been set too low; the unspeakable must be spoken for us to be free. A new school dedicated to the study of Africa -- the study of us -- should be founded on a serious commitment to that deep knowledge of freedom experienced on April 27 1994.

For us, such a school would be housed in a single, well-equipped building that would host ample community space, encouraging consistent day-to-day conversation and overall camaraderie among students, staff and welcomed visitors; it would also have dedicated artistic space for exhibitions, conferences, performances and meetings.

In these spaces, undergraduate and postgraduate students would learn and engage with permanent staff members specialising in the dedicated study of North Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, the Asian diaspora in Africa and the African diaspora.

Centralising African intellectual histories, an undergraduate programme would embrace many disciplines in real ways, training students in issues of representation, history, the arts, culture, society, politics, identity, economics and heritage to address what we are, what we have become and how we live together in difference.

Postgraduate students would engage similarly, but at a deeper, more philosophical level, their skills centred on theorisations of the oppressed, theorisations of our freedom.

This Freedom Day was a day of celebration and concern as South Africa and the continent continued the struggle to acknowledge and celebrate the disavowed. The struggle to imagine what it means to be human must be relentless for, as the past continues to walk in the present, we cannot pay, yet again, for domination to triumph. 

It is a day that must ask those difficult questions of what we are and how we live. It is a day of celebration of meaningful difference, of graciousness and of imagining that the seemingly impossible is possible indeed.

Siona O'Connell and Natasha Himmelman are PhD candidates in the University of Cape Town's Centre for African Studies. For all Concerned CAS Students documents and updates, and to participate in this conversation, please join us on our new blog: http://concernedcasstudents.wordpress.com/

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-29-lessons-in-continued-oppression


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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Our America, Their America: Obama's father forced out of Harvard, US

This piece reminds me of John Pepper Clark's epic and exhilaratingly interesting experience in America as a Princeton scholar as depicted in America, Their America (1964).
 
****************************
 

Files suggest elder Obama forced to leave Harvard

BOSTON – President Barack Obama's father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his Ph.D. in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to newly public immigration records.
Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to delay a request by Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to extend his stay in the U.S., "until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him," immigration official M.F. McKeon wrote in a June 1964 memo.
Harvard administrators, the memo stated, "were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had."
An earlier INS memo from McKeon said that while the elder Obama had passed his exams and was entitled on academic grounds to stay and complete his thesis, the school was going to try and "cook something up to ease him out."
"They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home," the memo stated.
In May 1964, David D. Henry, director of Harvard's international office, wrote to Obama to say that, while he had completed his formal course work, the economics department and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences didn't have the money to support him.
"We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis," Henry's letter stated.
Obama's request for an extended stay was denied by the INS. He left Harvard and — divorced from the president's mother — returned to his native Kenya in July 1964. He did not complete his Ph.D.
The immigration memos, contained in the elder Obama's Immigration and Naturalization file, were given to a Boston Globe reporter in 2009 through a Freedom of Information request. The papers were first made public Wednesday by The Arizona Independent, a weekly newspaper. The Associated Press obtained copies of them on Friday.
Harvard issued a statement Friday saying that it could not find in its own records anything to support the accounts given in the INS memos.
"While we cannot verify accounts of conversations that occurred nearly 50 years ago, a review of our existing files did not find any support for either the language or the implied intent described by the U.S. government official in the government documents," the statement read.
When Obama was attending Harvard, the school faced serious constraints in financing research by international graduate students, the university also said.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler declined to comment Friday, saying the department does not comment on specific immigration cases.
Concerns about Obama's personal life while he had been studying in the U.S. had been raised previously, according to the INS documents.
In 1961, while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii, the school's foreign student adviser called an immigration official and said Obama had recently married Stanley Ann Dunham — the president's mother — despite already having a wife in Kenya.
According to a memo written by an INS official in Honolulu, the adviser said Obama had been "running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways."
Obama told the adviser that he had divorced his wife in Kenya. He told the president's mother the same thing, though she would later learn it was a lie.
Obama worked for an oil company and as a government economist after returning to Africa, but his personal and professional life would later deteriorate. He died in a car crash in 1982, when the future president was 21 and a student at Columbia University.
___
Associated Press writer Alicia Caldwell in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Peeling Away Multiple Masks - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable - Review

Brother Tracy K. Flemming, yours is a most welcome new presence on
this Pan-African list-serve. For too long, especially since the time
when there was Obama bashing by some of the recalcitrant toms, I've
lamented the absence of more telling African-American inputs in our
USA-Africa Dialogue Series, which spells Africa with a C. In the late
counter-culture sixties and early seventies spelling America with a K
always implied fascism, a fascist America, and that's an America which
has never existed in or outside of my mind and so I have always
resisted the standard German and Swedish spelling of Africa with a K.
(Perhaps it should be spelled in hieroglyphics, when we get that far
in recovering the past with our more advanced linguistics studies??)
Just a short item here: Of course biographies, autobiographies could
be as fulsome as possible;too many gaps in the story leave too much
space to be filled in or interpreted by the fertile imagination of
either truth-seeking & well-wishing friends or the still hate-filled
enemies.
"He also suggests that Malcolm exaggerated his criminal youth in his
"Autobiography" to
create "an allegory documenting the destructive consequences of racism
within the U.S. criminal justice and penal system". Not only that, in
like manner the first hour or so of the Hollywood version "Malcolm X"
starring Denzel Washington (why not Larry Fisburne?) is almost a waste
of time, even granting that it wants to emphasise the humble origins
of greatness and Malcolm's evolution from a very low zero to one of
our great leaders of Africa-America and ultimately to Pan-African
leadership which is one of his great legacies – and of course at that
point to some people he was much more dangerous than being a mere
separatist.

The documentaries of Malcolm's life tell the story in a powerful
direct way. The audio & visual and written documentary materials in
sum total are more powerful than that Hollywood version.

Of course I would also like to make my own Hollywood film version
perhaps after reading Michiko Kakutani and Manning Marable and Rev.
Irene Monroe on the great man it should be time to do so without
causing any more unnecessary riots in Chicago.....

Right now this is the big hit in Sweden: "The Black Power Mixtape
1967-1975"

http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Black+Power+Mixtape+1967-1975

And the Edward Wilmot Blyden movie, is that also in the works, yet?
His "Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race" is still a very topical
issue.....

http://books.google.com/books?id=uBrjPOrkFZMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Christianity,+Islam+and+the+Negro+Race&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=nyS8TaTtCY7BtAb4v7n1BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false


On Apr 29, 11:08 pm, Tracy Flemming <cafenegrit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And yet another that first appeared in gbmnews.com by Rev. Irene
> Monroe:http://gbmnews.com/wp/?p=7550
>
> Malcolm X was "gay-for-pay"
>
> Before any of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
> communities laud Malcolm X as our new gay icon or castigate him for
> being a black heterosexist nationalist on the "down low," we might
> need to closely examine the recent revelation that for a period in his
> life Malcolm X engaged in same-sex relationships.
>
> Also, before any of us in the African American community flatly
> dismiss these assertions as part and parcel of a racist conspiratorial
> propaganda machine that is out to discredit our brother Malcolm, we
> need, at least, to hear these nagging claims.
>
> And this time hear them coming from one of our own — Manning Marable,
> a renowned and respected African American historian and social critic
> from Columbia University.
>
> Sadly, Marable died April 1, just days before the release of his
> magnum opus, an exhaustive and new 594-page biography Malcolm X: A
> Life of Reinvention, on April 4th, which also marks the anniversary of
> Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.
>
> His assertions in the book — deriving from meticulously combing
> through 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of
> Information Act, records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State
> Department and New York district attorney's office, as well as his
> interviews with members of Malcolm X's inner circle and security team
> — leaves the reader in shock and awe.
>
> For those of us who always thought Malcolm X's assassination, as with
> King's, had everything to do with J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I, we are
> correct. Marable emphatically states that both the F.B.I and NYPD had
> advance knowledge of Malcolm X's assassination plot, and did nothing
> to abort it.
>
> But what will come as a shock is Marable's assertions that the Malcolm
> X the world has come to know through Alex Haley's 1965 New York
> Timesbestseller The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Spike Lee's 1992
> filmMalcolm X based largely on Haley's book is fictive. And the spin
> we have, in part, is due to Malcolm himself.
>
> In creating an autobiographical narrative that would have his book fly
> off of bookshelves as well as elevate his status to a national — if
> not world — stage, Malcolm X intentionally fabricated, exaggerated,
> glossed over, and omitted vital facts about his life. One such fact
> omitted was his same-sex relationship with a white businessman.
>
> The claim, no doubt, will become a hotly contested topic in sectors of
> the African American community. With an iconography of racist images
> of black masculinity ranging from back in the day as Sambos, Uncle
> Toms, coons, and bucks to now gangsta hip-hoppers, Malcolm represented
> the negation of them.
>
> As a pop-culture hero to young black males of this generation and as
> the quintessential representation of black manhood of both America's
> Black Civil Rights and Black Power eras, a gay Malcolm X will be a
> hard, if not impossible, sell to the African American community.
>
> And here's why:
>
> At Malcolm X's funeral, held at the Faith Temple Church Of God in
> February 27, 1965, Ossie Davis, renowned African American actor and
> civil rights activist, delivered the eulogy stating the following:
>
> Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes. …
> Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his
> meaning to his people. …And we will know him then for what he was and
> is. A prince. Our own black shining prince who didn't hesitate to die
> because he loved us so.
>
> For a gangsta hip-hop generation Malcolm Little — before his
> conversation to the Nation of Islam and name change — represents for
> them a lauded hypermasculinity. And their male-dominated musical genre
> is aesthetically built on the most misogynistic and homophobic strains
> of Black Nationalism and afrocentricism.
>
> But this claim by Marable, however, of Malcolm's same-sex relationship
> is not new. Reports of Malcolm X's queerness was first revealed in
> Bruce Perry's 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed
> Black America.
>
> According to Perry, Malcolm's same-sex dalliances date back to
> childhood where he enjoyed being masturbated or fellated. In his 20s,
> Perry informs us, Malcolm had a sustained sexual relationship with a
> transvestite named Willie Mae, and also he had sex with gay men for
> money, boasting he serviced "queers."
>
> I am not heterosexist apologist, but if we, as LGBTQ, use this era of
> Malcolm's life to claim him as gay, we misunderstand the art and
> survival of street hustling culture.
>
> Similarly, if we, as African Americans, use this era of Malcolm's life
> to dismiss that he engaged in same-sex relationships, many will miss
> the opportunity to purge ourselves of homophobic attitudes.
>
> When Malcolm came to Boston to live with his older half-sister,
> Roxbury's Ella Little Collins, he was 16, having dropped out of school
> at 15. With no job skills and looking for the most expedient route to
> acquire money, Malcolm peddled cocaine, broke into homes of Boston's
> well-to-do, gambled big at poker games, and unabashedly serviced gay
> men for pay.
>
> While it can be argued that Malcolm's same-sex encounters were not
> solely financially motivated, let us also not dismiss that the only
> evidence we do have is the context in which he was.
>
> Short URL:http://gbmnews.com/wp/?p=7550

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Letter to Ugandan Minister of Justice on the Indefinite Detention of Prisoners with Psychosocial Disabilities

To the Ugandan Minister of Justice Kiddhu Makubuya

Your Excellency,

Human Rights Watch is pleased that 12 detainees convicted as juveniles and awaiting minister's orders were released on January 3rd this year after a consent decree. While encouraged by the release of these detainees, we write again to reiterate our concern regarding the continued and protracted incarceration of an additional 11 persons with psychosocial disabilities found not guilty by reason of insanity. Like the juvenile detainees, they have been imprisoned for years awaiting Minister's orders, as set out in the Trial on Indictments Act. We urge you to act on these cases by releasing these individuals, thereby upholding their rights guaranteed by international and regional human rights law as well as the Ugandan constitution.

Previously in June 2009, Human Rights Watch brought to your attention five individuals who were deemed by courts to be not guilty by reason of insanity and who are currently on remand in Luzira Prison. We write again to reiterate our concern about the continued inaction regarding these prisoners as well as an additional six individuals in Katojo Prison in Fort Portal, all found not guilty by reason of insanity and on prolonged remand, in one case over 16 years.  It is unclear how many detainees with psychosocial disabilities remain awaiting minister's orders in other rural prisons and therefore we wish to encourage you to collect full information about the number and condition of such other detainees. We have enclosed the details of each case known to Human Rights Watch below and we wish to encourage the Ministry to work with the Prisons Commission to identify similarly situated prisoners throughout the country and issue orders for release so cases can be resolved. Appropriate mental health services and community integration should be made available to them.

According to Section 48 of Uganda's Trial on Indictments Act, a person found to be not guilty for reason of insanity would be remanded to a prison, mental hospital, or other suitable place of safe custody as per the Minister's order until a determination is made on the case. The individual remains on remand until such a determination is made. Once the Minister of Justice has issued this order, the superintendent of the custodial facility where the individual is detained, is then required by law to issue regular reports to the minister regarding the individual's condition, history, and circumstances. When considering the periodic reports, the Minister of Justice may order the prisoner to be discharged.

However, Superintendents of custodial facilities are unfortunately not submitting such reports without the Minister's orders, which led to individuals being detained on remand indefinitely, a situation which constitutes arbitrary detention and a violation of human rights law. Moreover, whilst these individuals are on remand they have no effective opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of their detention as they do not in practice have access to lawyers. In practice, lawyers are only provided by the state at the trial stage. Given the particular psychosocial needs of these individuals, their cases should have been handled with the utmost speed and sensitivity. Those so detained are being held contrary to international, regional, and national principles on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The Ugandan constitution in Articles 32 and 35, as well as the Uganda Persons with Disabilities Act, guarantee persons with psychosocial disabilities the right to respect and human dignity. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights in Article 18(4) provides that persons with disabilities have the right to special measures of protection in keeping with their physical or moral needs. In the African Commission case Purohit and Moore v. The Gambia (Communication No. 241/2001), the commission declared that "mental health patients should be accorded special treatment which would enable them not only to attain but also sustain their optimum level of independence and performance in keeping with Article 18(4) of the African Charter."

According to the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which both Uganda is a party, everyone has the right to the highest standard of physical and mental health on the basis of free and informed consent. These individuals have been awaiting Minister's orders for periods of time ranging from one to 16 years.  SK[1] of Katojo Prison was arrested in 1991 on a murder charge and has been awaiting Minister's orders for over 16 years, since December 12, 1994.  Others have been waiting for over five or ten years.

The prolonged delay in notifying these 11 individuals of their legal status is a serious violation of their rights under national, regional, and international law.  Under the Ugandan constitution, article 28(1), all Ugandans have the right to a fair, speedy and public hearing before an independent and impartial court or tribunal established by law. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights sets out the rights of those accused of crimes before the law. Under article 7 of the charter, all defendants have the right to a conclusion of the proceedings against them within a reasonable time. Under articles 9(3) and 14(3)(c) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Uganda ratified in 1995, all defendants have the right to a conclusion of the proceedings against them without undue delay. Under article 9(4), everyone detained has a right to be able to challenge that detention, an option these individuals on remand can very rarely exercise in practice.

The fact that the detention of these individuals, and others who are being detained pursuant to section 48 of the Trial on Indictments Act, is dependent upon the decision of a member of the executive and not an independent tribunal also renders their detention arbitrary and unlawful under international human rights law. The law should therefore be amended to comply with Uganda's international commitments.

Below are the relevant details of the 11 cases. We urge the Honorable Minister to consider and promptly issue the appropriate orders as required by law so that the defendants can be informed of their legal status, and released to seek out assistance and/or treatment as they wish as soon as possible. We re-emphasize the importance of these cases and ask that you ensure that they are handled as required by law. Doing so will be an important step in respecting the basic rights of the individuals concerned.

We look forward to your prompt action on this matter and if the Honorable Minister or your colleagues wish to further discuss our concerns, we will be obliged to meet you at your convenience and thank you for your attention on this important matter.

Sincerely,

Daniel Bekele 
Africa Director
Human Rights Watch

 

CC:

Chief Justice Benjamin Odoki, Uganda Supreme Court

Hon. Medi Kaggwa, Chairman of the Uganda Human Rights Commission

Hon. Cyprien Musoke, Chairman of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, Parliament of Uganda

Hon. Erias Lukwago, Shadow Minister of Justice, Suite 116 London Chambers, Plot 4 Johnstone Street, Kampala

Dr. Margaret Mungherera, President, Uganda Medical Association, Kampala

 

Cases on remand awaiting Minister's orders involving persons with psychosocial disabilities in Luzira and Katojo Prisons, in order of length of time awaiting Minister's orders:

1. SK - MFP 437/1991 - FR 642/91 

SK was charged with murder, admitted to prison on December 12, 1991, and placed on Minister's order on December 12, 1994.  He is currently in Katojo Prison, Fort Portal

2. BA - UR 533/01 - CSC 42/98

BA was arrested for murder in 1997 and tried for murder by the Mbarara High Court. He was placed on Minister's orders during the trial on November 15, 2000.  He is currently in Luzira Prison.

3. MA - MFP 604/2001 - FR 907/01

MA was charged with defilement, admitted to prison on August 24, 2001, and placed on Minister's orders on January 30, 2006.  He is currently in Katojo prison, Fort Portal.

4. PBA - MFP 637/2001

PBA was charged with murder and attempted murder, admitted to prison on December 5, 2001, and placed on Minister's Orders on February 21, 2006.  He is currently in Katojo Prison, Fort Portal.

5. KR - MFP 485/2001 - FR 676/04

KR was charged with murder, admitted to prison on September 21, 2001, and placed on Minister's orders on March 7, 2006.  As of November 2010, he was transferred to Murchinson Bay, Luzira, for treatment.

6. BE - AA 129/2002 - FR 588/02

BE was charged with murder, admitted to prison on July 12, 2002, and placed on Minister's orders December 1, 2006.  He is currently in Katojo Prison, Fort Portal.

7. OJ - UR 149/07 - CSC 47/02

OJ was arrested and charged with defilement in 1999. He pled guilty in Gulu High Court. He was placed under Minister's orders on March 19, 2007 due to insanity. He is currently in Luzira Prison.

8. OB - UR 320/07 - CSC 57/04

OB has been charged with two cases of defilement. For the first case, he pled guilty, was convicted, and sentenced to 18 years.

For the second case, he pled not guilty, and was placed under Minister's orders on March 22, 2007 by the Gulu High Court due to insanity. He is currently in Luzira Prison.

9. BJY - US 854/2004 - CSC 66/06

BJY was arrested in 2005 on defilement charges, and placed on Minister's orders on October 22, 2007 due to reasons of insanity. He is currently in Luzira Prison.

10. BJ - UR 566/08 - CSC 0184/02

BJ was charged with defilement and placed under Minister's orders by the Mbale High Court on May 5, 2008 due to insanity.  He is currently in Luzira Prison.

11. MB - AA 89/2003

MB was charged with defilement, admitted to prison on November 12, 2004, and placed on Minister's Orders on September 29, 2009.  As of November 2010, he was transferred to Murchinson Bay Hospital, Luzira Prison, for treatment.

[1] Names have been withheld from public version of this letter.

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Black Is Brilliant

Mr. Flemming, thanks for posting this. It is amazing how we "intellectuals" fail to take time for inward introspection these days. L.

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Tracy Flemming <cafenegritude@gmail.com> wrote:
Black Is Brilliant
April 15, 2009 | 12:00 am

Alain Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher

By Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth

(University of Chicago Press, 432 pp., $45)

In conversation in London with the British Conservative leader David
Cameron this past summer, Barack Obama lamented the frantic over-
scheduling that encourages micromanagement and with it the temptation
to try and "solve everything and end up being a dilettante." Instead,
he concluded, "the most important thing you need to do is to have big
chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking." His
remark, not meant to be made public but caught on tape, did not make a
big splash, but the importance that Obama accorded to the need to stop
and think must count as one of the more revealing moments of his
campaign, not least because it gives some substance to the tag
"intellectual" that the media attached to him this past summer. Obama
is a cunning professional politician, but he is also undeniably an
intellectual, and that word--along with the cluster of others
invariably summoned up: bloodless professorial elitist egghead--became
a catchall term of opprobrium. But with his victory came a
rehabilitation of "intellectual" as a term of pride: a New York Times
columnist crowed that "the second most remarkable thing about his
election is that American voters have just picked a president who is
an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual." What would
W.E.B. Du Bois say?

One of the great intellectuals of any color, the prodigious Du Bois
comes to mind because, for him, a significant part of being an
intellectual was tied up with what Obama spoke of in London--the
capacity for, and the luxury of, stepping back from busyness to think.
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not, " Du Bois famously
declared, reflecting belief in the "kingdom of culture" as a space of
freedom, a realm "uncolored," above the imprisoning veil of the color
line. On a fellowship to Berlin in 1892 while pursuing graduate work
in economics, history, and sociology at Harvard, where he would be the
first black recipient of a doctorate, Du Bois was initiated into
aesthetic experience: "I had been before, above all, in a hurry, I
wanted a world hard, smooth and swift, and had no time for ...
unhurried thought and slow contemplation. Now at times I sat still."
He grew inward with Beethoven and Wagner, Rembrandt and Titian.

For black Americans in Jim Crow America, this capacity of relaxing
into thought and aesthetic pleasure was stunted by a double burden:
the reign of white supremacy, grounded in the alleged law of God and
Biology which held that black people were primarily bodies with, at
best, the minds of children, and the unwitting ratification of that
law by the leader of black America, Booker T. Washington. He
restricted black education to the hand and the heart, and not the
head. To be seen carrying books at the Tuskegee Institute risked
punishment, an echo of the plantation custom of severing a slave's
finger or hand if caught reading. Instead Washington's school was
devoted to making the Negro humble and useful to the rural communities
of the south--to know one's place, as it was defined by the Wizard of
Tuskegee, who scorned as useless learning the sight of a black child
studying a French grammar.

Working hand in glove with Northern philanthropists, Washington's
disdain for educating black minds made shrewd economic sense, as it
ensured a steady supply of cheap, non-unionized farm labor to keep the
cost of cotton profitable. Washington described Tuskegee itself as
serene, rooted "upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of
Mother Nature." Hence a black intellectual was a repugnant oxymoron
who violated Nature--Washington called them "artificial" men,
"graduates of New England colleges" with decadent tastes for "kid
gloves" and "fancy boots." He likely had the dapper mulatto Du Bois in
mind. Washington's anti-elitism is a hardy perennial of American life.
It expresses what is our national second nature--the rage to purify
bound up in the simplifying power of "American pastoral," as Philip
Roth calls our ineradicable will to innocence that divides the world
in two. Nature--the preserve of the rural, the pre-modern, the
authentic, and the masculine--defines itself against the Unnatural--
the Babylon of modernity, urban foppery, effeminacy, and
intellectuality.

Du Bois distilled the disturbance embodied in the idea of a black
intellectual into a word: he called it a "problem." And the "strange
experience" of "how it feels to be a problem" is the haunting subject
of his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk, which appeared in 1903.
The book's most famous chapter demolishes Washington, cleverly turning
the charge of effeteness against him by denouncing his stance as
counseling "unmanly" submission. The most vivid and pained portrait of
the "problem" of being a black intellectual forms the book's sole work
of fiction, Du Bois's great short story "Of the Coming of John." Here,
in a displaced, symbolic autobiography, Du Bois meets the challenge of
representing a newly emergent social type who seemed to affront every
way of making sense of black identity in Jim Crow America. Attending a
provincial college, John Jones grows from rowdy frat boy to becoming
intoxicated with the "world of thought."

To represent, in 1903, a black man thinking pushed the perversity of
intellection to an extreme. John's capacity for becoming lost in
thought becomes the tale's motif: listening to Lohengrin at the
Metropolitan Opera, he is lost in aesthetic bliss, and the final scene
of Du Bois's story finds him humming Wagner's music, barely aware of
the onrushing lynching party as it descends upon him. (He has killed
the white man who was molesting his sister.) Eerily indifferent to his
imminent demise, John in his trancelike absorption becomes
unintelligible, a status that registers the black intellectual's
historical reality in that era: stranded in a no-man's-land, seeming
neither to know his place nor to have a place, hence synonymous with
enigma.

John Jones tastes the freedom of life above the veil, and in a sense
he dies of it. His paralysis seemed to serve his creator as an object
lesson, a warning, even a spur to the torrential productivity,
versatility, and creativity that defined Du Bois's own career. He
conducted that career, of course, not on the lofty heights of his
ideal "kingdom of culture" but within the veil, where he was "kept in
bounds" by the daily humiliations of segregation. He died in 1963 at
ninety-five in his friend Nkrumah's independent state of Ghana, on the
eve of the march on Washington. For all his accomplishments, Du Bois
always believed that white racism, as he said in 1934, "has made me
far less rounded a human being than I should like to have been."
Coupled with that cost was his ineradicable sense of self-sacrifice in
behalf of race service, and the twin constraints shape the concluding
tableau of "Of the Coming of John." It is a compelling mix of defiance
and doom, as Du Bois wrapped John Jones in the robes of tragedy. And
later writers' incarnations of the black intellectual, even when
imbued with mordant wit and gallows humor, by and large remained
garbed in tragedy for much of the century, as if born with a
birthright of existential anguish. The titles alone tell the tale:
Invisible Man; Nobody Knows My Name; The Outsider; American Hunger.



Alain Locke, who was born in Philadelphia in 1885, was seventeen years
younger than Du Bois, and had little use for the pathos of blackness.
He declined the cloak of tragedy: "I am not a race problem. I am Alain
LeRoy Locke, " he declared as he arrived at Oxford as the first
African American Rhodes Scholar.

Locke regarded his iron confidence as his birthright as a proper and
proud member of an old free black family of educators. The son and
grandson of highly cultivated people on both sides, Locke was nearly
blase about entering Harvard in 1904. His letters home from college
bear little evidence of anxiety. By 1912 he was a professor of
philosophy at Howard, where he would teach for four decades.

Locke remains best known as a prime catalyst of the blossoming of
black literary and artistic life in 1925 known as the Harlem
Renaissance, which he showcased in his landmark anthology The New
Negro. Always a controversial figure--"the high priest of the
intellectual snobbocracy" was not an untypical reaction--Locke is now
the subject of a first biography that rescues him from caricature and
brings alive his distinctive fashioning of the role of black
intellectual. Like Du Bois, Locke studied at the University of Berlin
before taking a Harvard doctorate. And as they returned from the
relative freedom of Europe, both men would wrestle with "unreconciled
strivings," as Du Bois called the tension between race man and
aesthete, between puritan and pagan, between the pursuit of social
justice and the self-cultivation embodied in their cherished German
ideal of Bildung.

It was a homegrown figure, William James, whom Du Bois and Locke held
in common as an intellectual touchstone. Of his Harvard mentor, Du
Bois had declared in his autobiography: "God be praised that I landed
squarely in the arms of William James." James had pretty much retired
from teaching by the time Locke entered Harvard, but when he lectured
at Oxford in 1908, Locke was a most receptive member of the audience.
James's pragmatism spoke with particular urgency to these black
thinkers. Along with Franz Boas's anthropology, which was another
crucial influence on both Du Bois and Locke, pragmatism was a tool
that virtually stood alone from turn-of-the-century behavioral and
social sciences in opposing the theory and the practice of white
supremacy. Pragmatist pluralism, like Boasian contextualism, dismissed
what James called "all the great single word answers to the world's
riddle, such as God, the One ... Nature" and "The Truth," as "perfect
idols of the rationalistic mind!"

Locke possessed a cool detachment that was the source of a remarkable
self-awareness and absence of self-pity, qualities that allowed him to
minimize and to manage the pathos that inevitably afflicted an
American of his gifts, ambitions, and color. Like all black
intellectuals of his era he found himself "trapped between two
worlds," but unlike many others Locke seemed to resolve the
frustrations. Unlike Du Bois, he did not make a career out of them. He
would never be capable, at least in public, of the flamboyant
histrionics that Du Bois displays at the start of his autobiography:
"Crucified on the vast wheel of time, I flew round and round with the
Zeitgeist, waving my pen ... to see, foresee and prophesy." The
audacity of Du Bois's mind set him apart, and eventually made him a
worldhistorical figure. Locke knew his own limits and was guided by a
stoic steadiness and an irony about himself that helped him to
persevere and thereby to avoid becoming one more burned-out case, the
fate of many of his famous Harlem friends.

Refusing to be a "problem," Locke instead led a life "in the key of
paradox, " as he retrospectively remarked. And his cultivation of
paradox has always kept him out of focus. Contemporary scholars tend
to simplify by casting him either as a race man or an apolitical
aesthete. Yet in fact, as Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth show,
Locke kept up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually
refined itself and deepened. Though he wrote excellent literary
journalism, he was primarily an academic philosopher, and the slim
amount of his published work reflected a pace customary in his
discipline. If and when he is read these days it is for his
introduction to The New Negro.

But the current neglect of Alain Locke should not make us skeptical of
the claim made by his biographers, who call him "the most influential
African American intellectual born between W.E.B Du Bois and Martin
Luther King, Jr." They are right. Locke won acclaim as the self-
described "philosophical mid- wife" to the Harlem Renaissance. But his
most interesting writings on race and culture remain his least known,
perhaps because they challenge the racial chauvinism that the race man
inevitably traffics in. These writings, mostly from the later decades
of his career--"The Contribution of Race to Culture," "Who and What is
'Negro'?" and "Frontiers of Culture" (all found in Leonard Harris's
valuable collection of Locke's writings)--adumbrate an anti-
proprietary notion of cosmopolitanism that urges us to consider that
"culture has no color ... there is no monopoly, no special proprietary
rights" about culture. Unfortunately, this biography, for all its
careful explication of Locke's ideas, neglects Locke's richest
reflections.

The paradoxical Locke, barely five feet and with a rheumatic heart,
was a whirlwind of activity, an unabashed elitist and aesthete but one
who refused what he called "an ivory tower of colorless
cosmopolitanism" and instead "dug deep into the human soil." His
cosmopolitanism was hands-on and immersive. An inveterate world
traveler not only to Europe but also Egypt and Russia and Africa, an
expert on and collector of African art, Locke's worldliness inspired
his recognition that cultures are not discrete organic wholes
embodying a nation's blood but composite, impure assemblages, created
in reciprocal exchange with other cultures. His global and trans-
national perspectives--what he called "intercultural reciprocity"--
were way ahead of their time.

He made his reputation with his race work in the "human soil" back
home, where he became a self-described "advocate of cultural racialism
as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro." His advocacy
proved effective because he had mastered the cultural politics of the
two centers of black intellectual life: Washington D.C., his
professional outpost as a professor at Howard, and New York City,
where, especially after 1925, he visited most weekends and kept a room
in Harlem. Charming and generous, adept at cultivating the powerful
but with a fine eye for younger talent, Locke knew everyone, was a
tireless organizer of educational programs, musical productions,
publishing and lecture series, and awards dinners, while chairing
countless editorial, foundation, and fellowship boards. As the
personal executor and confidante to a wealthy and eccentric white
patron, the patronizing Charlotte Osgood Mason, known to all as
"Godmother," Locke distributed stipends while enduring her romantic
racialist fatuities: she called him "my precious brown boy" and,
believing that "all Negroes are after all the children of the sun,"
urged him to be more natural and "slough off this weight of white
culture."

Locke's role as consummate insider dispensing largesse made him a
lightning rod for criticism. Some of it was justified: as an editor,
he compromised the radicalism of Claude McKay's poetry and had a nasty
rivalry with the novelist and editor Jesse Fauset. Conflicted emotions
and frayed relations marked virtually all Locke's friendships with the
writers he took up and put down--among them Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes (with whom he was once romantically involved), and Zora Neale
Hurston. Few were as flagrantly divided as Hurston, a principal
recipient, along with Hughes, of Godmother's philanthropy. Hurston
began her long and combative association with Locke as his student at
Howard, where his skepticism of racial uplift and absolutist thinking
was an important influence. She once urged him to succeed Du Bois as
the central race leader, but after reading Locke's less than warm
review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, she called him, in a letter to
James Weldon Johnson, "a malicious, spiteful little snot that thinks
he ought to be the leading Negro because of his degrees. "

Not only was Locke inevitably caught in the crossfire to which any
gatekeeper is exposed, but his imperious manner only made matters
worse. His suavity bothered even himself ("my tongue never tires as
you know," he wrote his doting mother, "indeed it is oiled to an
appalling slickness.... I don't know that I can even be sincere with
you"), and the open secret of his homosexuality (which made, he once
said, a "haughty distrust" mandatory) made him a target for gossip and
ridicule. Detested by some, respected by many, Locke possessed an
undeniable intellectual brilliance and a capacious vision of world
culture. For aspiring writers such as Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
seeking to break out of the racial province, he was a "heroic figure."

Growing up a pampered only child, Locke once recalled that his mother
"dipped me as a very young child in the magic waters of cold cynicism
and haughty distrust and disdain of public opinion." His mother,
according to Locke's estimate, raised "an almost hurt-proof child."
The "almost" pointed to what he called his "all too vulnerable
Achilles heel of homosexuality--which she may have suspected was
there, both for her sake and my own safety--I kept in an armored shoe
of reserve and haughty caution." That remoteness came easy. Laughter
was barred in the Locke household. Instead his father smiled and
whistled, and (as his son explained) "the smile substituted not in a
sour but in a debonair way--This was the antidote of being Negro--the
distinguished protest of the second and third generation away from
slavery."

The startling frankness of Locke's remark raises questions. In a white
world where black laughter was the image of the happy and ignorant
"Sambo," was the household taboo on impulse and spontaneity, the
Lockes' commitment in effect to anti-nature, an equal and opposite
deformation inflicted by racism? Harris and Molesworth wisely favor a
less moralistic reading; they suggest that Locke's upholding of anti-
nature turns his renunciation of spontaneous impulse from a symptom of
racist confinement into a valuable basis of receptivity to the
discipline of style and technical mastery. Locke revered African art
precisely because it lacked the sloppy exuberance and naivete of the
African American spirit, which had been formed in response to the
"peculiar experience in America." African art was "disciplined,
sophisticated, laconic and fatalistic"--in short, much like Alain
Locke.



At Oxford as a Rhodes, he happily succumbed to the social whirl of
campus life--he was soon changing clothes four and five times a day to
keep up with his social calendar, and before long was deeply in debt
to tailors and food emporiums--and eventually tasted of the wider
freedoms, cultural and sexual, offered by London, Paris, and Berlin.
Locke's four years on the continent encouraged devotion to what he
called his one religion, the Greek ideal of friendship, and all his
life he treasured his relations with sensitive young men. Perhaps his
most adored was Langston Hughes, whom he long pursued until Hughes
finally surrendered for a time in Paris in the spring and summer of
1924.

But there was more going on at Oxford than high life. Though he had
declared "I'm not going to England as a Negro," that is, as a "dime
museum freak" on exhibition as a representative of the race, Southern
white Rhodes scholars would not let him forget his color. They made
every effort to exclude and to embarrass him. Oxford's Cosmopolitan
Club came to the rescue, an oasis of hospitality amid the attempts to
segregate him. At the Cosmopolitan Club, Locke met impressive men of
color, including several who were colonial subjects of the British
Empire, "men who impressed Locke with their commitment to return to
their various countries and serve the interests of their people."

Locke's community of friends at the Club began to raise his racial and
political consciousness, making him come to grips with the cultural
legacy of Africa and with the outrages of imperialism. He began to
devise an intense cosmopolitanism as a weapon against segregation and
rigid classification--enemies shared by William James. By 1911, the
year he returned to the United States, he was on his way to becoming
an Africanist and human paradox: a cosmopolitan race man.

This double perspective guided Locke's most lasting achievement: the
editorship of the epochal anthology The New Negro, which surveyed, and
was itself a part of, the artistic and intellectual ferment of the
Harlem Renaissance. "Locke had been preparing for the Renaissance for
almost two decades," Harris and Molesworth report. His years in Europe
amid urban modernism, his academic training in pragmatism with its
emphasis on democratic pluralism, his diverse contacts and interests:
all this helped to make Locke, though he neither lived in Harlem nor
was an editor, the man for the moment. His chance came when he was
asked to edit a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic, a leading
progressive magazine of sociology and culture. Locke assembled a
diverse and stellar group of contributors (while playing down
sociology and economics, which he found dull, and adding more art and
literature), and made the Harlem issue a hit, selling over thirty
thousand copies and generating so much attention that it soon gave
birth to an expanded hardcover edition called The New Negro. It
contained articles on art, music, sociology, anthropology and history,
poems, stories, drama, original art work; its contributors were young
and old, black, white, male, female, all viewing matters from vantages
variously local, national, and international.

Locke's introduction set the turbulent scene of Harlem in global
perspective. In Harlem, he wrote, "the first concentration in history
of so many diverse elements of Negro life"--African, West Indian and
Negro American--is the "laboratory of a great race-welding," as "the
elements undergo "contact and interaction." As the "home of the
Negro's 'Zionism,'" Harlem bids to be a "race capital," and is at the
center of the "mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from
that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery
have so largely been responsible." "As with the Jew, persecution is
making the Negro international." Harlem "has the same role to play for
the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the
New Czechoslovakia." Admiring these "nascent centers of folk-
expression and self- determination," Locke gives voice to a romantic
nationalism akin to Herder's.

Embracing global cosmopolitan modernity, The New Negro sought to bury
the deadly cliches of white paternalism: "the day of 'aunties,'
'uncles,' and 'mammies'" are redolent of "yesterday," as are "Uncle
Tom and Sambo" as emblems of a naive and humble race. The American
mind, Locke declared in the title essay, "must reckon with a
fundamentally changed Negro" and a "new group psychology" of "self-
respect" derived from a "deep feeling of race." This "renewed race-
spirit" "consciously and proudly sets itself apart." But lest his
claim seem to align him with Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement--
a significant force in Harlem in the 1920s but barely present in The
New Negro--Locke sets this proud race spirit squarely within the
democratic ideals of America: "the Negro mind reaches out as yet to
nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this forced attempt to
build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment,
and its ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest
sharing of American culture and institutions." To those Americans who
hope that "the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist," Locke
replies: "this cannot be--even if it were desirable," because
"democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any
of its channels are closed." He was fanning new life into Du Bois's
famous question to his white readers near the end of The Souls of
Black Folk--"your country? How came it yours?" Du Bois's point is that
"before the Pilgrims landed we were here" and "mingled our blood" with
this nation, facts that expose what his readers would prefer not to
know--the reality of motley mixture.



After 1925, Locke's fame and audience broadened, with visiting
appointments at University of Wisconsin, the New School, a lecture at
Harvard, membership in prestigious interracial collaborations. But
accounts of his career usually look only at the Locke of the Harlem
Renaissance years, who championed beauty over the use of art as
propaganda. This biography's account of his later decades valuably
complicates the conventional image of Locke as a rarefied elitist by
showing in detail that by the mid-1930s Locke acknowledged that there
was "no cure or saving magic in art" in a world of "capitalistic
exploitation" and the "disease-and crime-ridden slum." He supported
the New Deal, and though he was never a man of the left ("too
Philadelphian for that!"), his concern for aesthetics gave way to
politics, especially on the issues of democracy, race, and
citizenship. Challenging what he dubbed "the most sacrosanct of all
our secular concepts, the autonomous sovereignty of the self-arbiter
nation," Locke urged the abandonment of the "Pax Romana of
irrepressible power politics" that rules America's economic
imperialism of "dollar diplomacy," and its replacement by a "Pax
democratica of reciprocal international rights and responsibilities"
that "would give democracy full moral stature."

The dire state of world politics, the bellicose ethnic nationalisms
that used "race as a political instrument" to foment violence, led him
to revisit his own earlier use of race as a political instrument in
the 1920s. He looked back on The New Negro as "defensive, promotive
propaganda." In 1950, he confessed that he was "both proud and
ashamed" of his "brain child": the Harlem Renaissance had been
valuable but it did not achieve its potential, owing to a "false
conception of culture" as a "market-place commodity." Once the "New
Negro" took hold, it "offered that irresistible American lure of a
vogue of success ... an easy cheap road to vicarious compensation."
Instead of emphasizing the "substance" of Negro life, "complexion"
came first. Locke had learned an important lesson, a way to grasp race
and culture that would defuse racial anger and cultural chauvinism:
"Culture-goods, once evolved, are no longer the exclusive property of
the race or people that originated them. They belong to all who can
use them; and belong most to those who can use them best. " More
succinctly, "culture has no color."

Locke here reaches back to the teachings of an earlier generation, as
in effect he revives and adapts for the mid-century world an insight
of his Howard colleague and mentor Kelly Miller, a prominent turn-of-
the-century race leader and later a professor of mathematics. In 1905,
in his "open letter" to the white Southern novelist Thomas Dixon,
Miller refuted the familiar claim that "the Negro lives in the light
of the white man's civilization." The white man, Miller asserted, "has
no exclusive proprietorship of civilization. White man's civilization
is as much a misnomer as the white man's multiplication table. It is
the equal inheritance of anyone who can appropriate and apply it." As
Du Bois did earlier in his notion of the uncolored "kingdom of
culture," and Locke would do later in equating the anti-proprietary
and the cosmopolitan, Miller de-racialized culture by making one's
relation to it a matter of present action, not prior identity. What
becomes pivotal is the desire and capacity for doing--for sitting with
Shakespeare.

The imperative to act in a world in which "all is shades and no
boundaries" and experience "overflows its own definition," was how
William James described the premises of his "radical empiricism," a
vision articulated at Oxford when Locke heard him lecture. James
emphasized that pluralism is the "permanent form" of the world, which
entails treating "assured conclusions concerning matters of fact" as
hypotheses, subject to "modification in the course of future
experience." Although Locke's biographers are clear about his
pragmatist orientation, they confine it to a distrust of absolutist
systems and to "cultural relativism," while ignoring how liberating
was James's insouciance toward alleged necessities, his skepticism of
the authority of origin, essence, and identity, and his esteem for the
unclassified and unbounded.

In minimizing James's influence and Kelly Miller's, Harris and
Molesworth inevitably scant Locke's rejection of the proprietary. The
one time the word comes up is in a letter from the late 1920s that
they cite, in which Locke remarks that "I hold to no proprietary
notion about human relationships. Jealousy and the monopoly it
implies ... I hold essentially vulgar." Here, had they realized it, is
the emotional ground of Locke's intellectual affinity for anti-
proprietary cosmopolitanism. Locke thought the idea so important that
he regarded it as an inevitable part of a "solution reconciling
nationalism with internationalism, racialism with universalism." We
ignore this anti-proprietary understanding of culture at our peril, he
warned, for "the vicious practice of vested proprietary interests in
various forms of culture" undergirds imperialism and is responsible
for the "tragedies of history." What must be recovered, he insisted,
is the "long ignored" but "very elemental historical fact" of "an
almost limitless natural reciprocity between cultures. Civilization,
for all its claims of distinctiveness, is a vast amalgam of cultures."

This rejection of the primacy of identity in matters of culture
remains insufficiently appreciated in our day. The idea and its
avatars are overshadowed by the prestige of multiculturalism, with its
coarse tribalism and its ugly purism. So I am glad to note a rare
exception to this neglect. In 1968, Philip Rieff, the great
sociologist of culture, attempted to rescue Kelly Miller from
oblivion: "Shakespeare and Whitman belonged to him; they were part of
his inalienable life; they did not belong to butchers in London or
slobs in Camden simply because they happen to be white men. Race is
the most terrible cultural simplification of all; in his wisdom and
learning, Miller rejected the fatal simplicity that the provenance of
a value determined membership in it." And, echoing Locke, Rieff
proclaimed that "a culture has no color ... A high culture is a living
and active faith." Rieff was writing in the midst of a resurgence of
identity politics--more specifically, of the black nationalist
celebration of "black values." A few years later Rieff remarked that
the slogan "black is beautiful" played into the remissive role that
white radicals--most egregiously Norman Mailer--invited blacks to
enact; and, with the "nobility" of Du Bois in mind, Rieff hoped that
the slogan might be replaced by "Black is Brilliant." Had he been
alive on January 20, 2009, Rieff might have admitted that his wish had
been granted.

Ross Posnock teaches English and American Studies at Columbia
University and is the author of Color & Culture (Harvard University
Press) and Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton
University Press).

By Ross Posnock

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