20 September 2010
Book: "No Serenity Here"
NEW BOOK INFORMATION: No Serenity Here
An Anthology of African poetry in English, French, Portuguese Amharic and Arabic translated into Chinese, edited by Kaiyu Xiao, Isabel Ferrin-Aguirre and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
244 pages
Publisher: World Knowledge Publishers, Shanghai
October 2010
ISBN 978-7-5012-3895-8
Six months, about 1000 e-mails, one facebook chat and here it is: No Serenity Here, a contemporary anthology of African poetry to be launched during the Shanghai Biennale in October 2010. Original poems in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Amharic will be published alongside their Chinese translations. The volume includes Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, along with voices from 25 African countries, and was translated by a team of Chinese poets under the guidance of Kaiyu Xiao.
Edited by Xiao in China, Isabel Ferrin-Aguirre in Berlin and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers in Johannesburg, No Serenity Here celebrates established writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Makhosazana Xaba and Lebo Mashile (South Africa), Veronique Tadjo (Cote d’Ivoire) and Fatima Naoot (Morocco), and introduce lesser known yet brilliant voices like TJ Dema (Botswana), Shailja Patel (Kenya) and Tania Tome (Mocambique), as well as Amanda Hammar and Joyce Chigiya (both from Zimbabwe).
Besides the veterans like Soyinka (Nigeria), Kofi Anyodoho (Ghana), Chirikure Chirikure (Zimbabwe), James Matthews (South Africa) and Keorapetse Kgositsile (South Africa’s Poet Laureate, whose poem lent the title to the anthology), the volume also showcases the prodigious talents of Shabbir Bhanoobhai (South Africa), Nii Ayikwei Parkes (Ghana), Tolu Ogunlesi and Obododimma Oha (Nigeria), Stanley Onjezani Kenani (Malawi) and Beaven Tapureta (Zimbabwe), Keamogetsi Molapong and Dorian Haarhoff (Namibia), Hama Tuma and Alemu Tebeje Ayele (both from Ethiopia).
“We read widely, but it was the contact with contemporary poets that brought the project to life and delivered its unique vibrancy and varied voice,” says Ferrin-Aguirre, who also worked until recently as a programmer for the Berlin Poesiefestival and researcher for the Literatuurwerkstatt, a global database of poets which collects recordings of poets reciting their work in their original languages in its Lyrikline project.
Acclaimed Chinese poet and academic Kaiyu Xiao admits in his foreword: “the poems … would make me physically quiver as the poems shattered my expectations.” Many of the poets are appearing in print for the first time, and most of them for the first time in Chinese.
“African writers have made an important contribution to the world reservoir of thought on the human condition; this is just a small part of the literary wealth that we have to offer. China has given us so much, and I’m proud that we are reciprocating,” said writer and performer de Villiers.
Published by World Knowledge Publishers and commissioned by artist and philanthropist Mr Hu, the tri-continental project also received support from the Jiang Nan Art and Design Foundation and the Moonchu Foundation.
…/ends
For further information contact Phillippa Yaa de Villiers phillippayaa@gmail.com
Isabel Ferrin-Aguirre aguirre_siemer@hotmail.com
Kaiyu Xiao kaiyu@gmx.de
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Review by New Internationalist
The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories
by Hama Tuma
(Heinemann ISBN 0-435-90590-2 )
‘Writers in Ethiopia are as rare as peace,’ asserts Hama Tuma and that alone could be reason for welcoming his book. But there are others. The first half consists of satirical stories set in a court of law where such dangerous criminals as queue-breakers and incurable hedonists are tried.
Though the stories are short on plot they have a Swiftean bite: the writing is deceptively simple and admirably taut. The Ethiopia that is revealed in this collection is a land of paradoxes where everyday people must have an array of masks ready to counter the machinations of the militia. As case follows case in the courtroom, the most topsy-turvy arguments are followed to more and more bizarre conclusions. Yet the reader finds the overall picture getting increasingly clear.
Like all good satire the details are worked out for maximum effect, giving the stories a sense of inevitability. The narrator acts as a naive observer who, like the child noticing the Emperor’s nakedness, reveals every discrepancy of an absurdly repressive state through what he says and what he leaves unsaid.
by Hama Tuma
(Heinemann ISBN 0-435-90590-2 )
‘Writers in Ethiopia are as rare as peace,’ asserts Hama Tuma and that alone could be reason for welcoming his book. But there are others. The first half consists of satirical stories set in a court of law where such dangerous criminals as queue-breakers and incurable hedonists are tried.
Though the stories are short on plot they have a Swiftean bite: the writing is deceptively simple and admirably taut. The Ethiopia that is revealed in this collection is a land of paradoxes where everyday people must have an array of masks ready to counter the machinations of the militia. As case follows case in the courtroom, the most topsy-turvy arguments are followed to more and more bizarre conclusions. Yet the reader finds the overall picture getting increasingly clear.
Like all good satire the details are worked out for maximum effect, giving the stories a sense of inevitability. The narrator acts as a naive observer who, like the child noticing the Emperor’s nakedness, reveals every discrepancy of an absurdly repressive state through what he says and what he leaves unsaid.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
New Book by Berhanu Sertsu
ግፋ ቢል አዶላና ሌሎች ወጎች
የተባለ መጽሓፍ በገበያ ላይ ዋለ!!
ከየከተማዎቹ በአፈሳና በሰበካ የተወሰዱ ሰዎች በቀድሞው አዶላ በጉልበት ወርቅ አምራችነት ያሳለፉትን ሕይወት የሚዳስስ መጽሓፍ ከአሁን ቀደም ‘የደርግ የእስራት ዘመን’ የሚለውን መጽሓፍ ባቀረበልን በብርሃኑ ሠርፁ ተደርሶ በገበያ ላይ ውሏል። ገዝታችሁ በማንበብ የአዶላን የቀድሞ ገጽታ ተረዱ በሌሎቹም ወጎች ተዝናኑ።
ዋጋው £10.00
ከአውሮፓና ከለንደን በፖስታ ለሚያዙ መላኪያ £3.00
ከአሜሪካ ለሚያዝዙ £5.00
መጽሓፉ በለንደን እንጎቻ የባልትና ውጤቶች መደብር ይገኛል።
ከአስር መጻሕፍት በላይ ለሚያዙ የዋጋ ቅናሽ የሚደረግ ሲሆን በሚከተለው አድራሻ ይጠይቁን።
B_sertsu@hotmail.com
የተባለ መጽሓፍ በገበያ ላይ ዋለ!!
ከየከተማዎቹ በአፈሳና በሰበካ የተወሰዱ ሰዎች በቀድሞው አዶላ በጉልበት ወርቅ አምራችነት ያሳለፉትን ሕይወት የሚዳስስ መጽሓፍ ከአሁን ቀደም ‘የደርግ የእስራት ዘመን’ የሚለውን መጽሓፍ ባቀረበልን በብርሃኑ ሠርፁ ተደርሶ በገበያ ላይ ውሏል። ገዝታችሁ በማንበብ የአዶላን የቀድሞ ገጽታ ተረዱ በሌሎቹም ወጎች ተዝናኑ።
ዋጋው £10.00
ከአውሮፓና ከለንደን በፖስታ ለሚያዙ መላኪያ £3.00
ከአሜሪካ ለሚያዝዙ £5.00
መጽሓፉ በለንደን እንጎቻ የባልትና ውጤቶች መደብር ይገኛል።
ከአስር መጻሕፍት በላይ ለሚያዙ የዋጋ ቅናሽ የሚደረግ ሲሆን በሚከተለው አድራሻ ይጠይቁን።
B_sertsu@hotmail.com
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Hama Tuma book published
AFRICAN ABSURDITIES IV
WHY DON' THEY EAT COLTAN?
to order a copy contact
sankisa@comcast.net
PRICE US $ 15
POSTAGE US $ 3
TOTAL US $ 18
WHY DON' THEY EAT COLTAN?
to order a copy contact
sankisa@comcast.net
PRICE US $ 15
POSTAGE US $ 3
TOTAL US $ 18
Monday, October 18, 2010
READING HAMA TUMA IN HEBREW
Reading Hama Tuma in Hebrew
21 June 2009
Written by: Ayelet Dekel
“Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.”
Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator”
Western culture has a penchant for worshipping the exotic from a safe myopic distance, overlooking the human reality rubbing up against its elbows and knees, unintentionally creating cross-cultural connections comical, frustrating, and inspirational all at once. Israel, literally and figuratively, finds itself somewhere between Europe and Africa. The “people of the Book”, are currently celebrating “Book Week” with hundreds of new titles on display in all the major cities. Despite Israel’s considerable Ethiopian population, the only work of fiction (to the best of this writer’s knowledge) published by an Ethiopian writer this year is Hama Tuma’s The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories, translated by Dori Parnes (Ahuzat Bayit 2009). Activist writer-in-exile Hama Tuma’s book is out of print and essentially unavailable in English, and has never been officially published in Ethiopia in either Amharic or English, so if you want to read this brilliantly funny, sensitive, intelligent portrayal of life under Mengistu’s reign of terror, start learning Hebrew.
The book is written in two parts, each consisting of eleven stories. The stories in the first part are all written as court cases, described by a narrator, able to observe and comment, yet not personally involved in the proceedings. This distance allows an ironic humor to permeate the text, as translator Dori Parnes recounts, “The first thing that grabbed me was his humor…then you suddenly reach the second half – it grabs you by the throat. These are the same stories but he tells them with pain.” Hama Tuma, who has been a political activist for freedom and human rights since his student days in the 1960s, “stumbled” into fiction writing when he responded to a BBC call for short stories.
“Vendetta”, the opening story of the book’s second part, was his first work of fiction, growing out of the painful experiences of life under Mengistu’s regime, and the moral dilemmas with which people had to contend on a daily basis. Translator Parnes says of “Vendetta”: “I was stunned when I finished translating it. It wipes the smile off your face and you say to yourself – what was it that I smiled at before?” “Most of it has not been written,” says Hama Tuma of this period in Ethiopian history, “What really happened, happened in a worse way.”
The Hebrew edition is prefaced by Professor Hagai Erlich’s eloquent introduction, providing an historical perspective on the revolution in Ethiopia which began in hope and culminated in oppression. Comparing Mengistu’s reign to that of Stalin, Hitler and Sadam Hussein, Erlich notes that a key to the success of these regimes lay in their ability to release the potential “little Stalin” and “little Adolf” lurking within any of us, and let them take over the hearts and minds of the people. As it happens, while he was translating the book, Parnes read Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia based on personal archives and interviews. Parnes says, “What 50 years of that government did to a people is more terrible than what Hitler did in 12 years. People were born into it. The books complement one another, I didn’t have much comfort between the two…When you read one and translate the other, your dreams at night are not very pleasant.”
“A lot of people collaborated out of fear,” says Hama Tuma, “They denounced others or didn’t help. It is a sad part of our history, we should live it as such, or else nothing is learned. I offer my stories as a suggestion: we should look for another way of solving the problems.” Hama Tuma’s stories penetrate the heart, mind and dreams. His humor is grounded in unflinching honesty, nurtured by a wellspring of hope, a sense of fun and mischief: “to prick their serious balloons.”
Parnes originally translated two of Hama Tuma’s stories at the request of Doron Tavory, artistic director of Hazira Performing Arts Center, for a stage adaptation to be performed by the Netela Theatre Company. “It suddenly aroused my curiosity,” says Parnes, who went to great lengths to acquire a copy of the book, feeling, “there is something here that seems to me important.” In his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Walter Benjamin discusses the way that a translation reveals the hidden connections between languages, saying that a good translation will bring some of the “foreign,” of the other language and culture into the text of the target language. Reading his translation inspired my own quest to locate the author, as described in “Finding Hama.”
The relationship between Israel and Ethiopia is ancient and current, certainly complex. The Ethiopian monarchy considered themselves descendents of King Solomon and the Jewish community there, known as Beta Israel, has ancient roots. Israelis are also mentioned in the book as having trained the Ethiopian military in interrogation techniques. As Parnes notes, “Our excellent young men went to give them all sorts of tips…Why must Israel be involved in the ugliest things?” This journey from Addis Abbaba, through Paris, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv brings forth a work of fiction in Hebrew that makes Ethiopia a more vivid part of our lives, to reflect on Israel’s relationship to Ethiopia and by extension, the situation of Ethiopian Israelis. Says Parnes, “I am curious to know if the book will reach the members of the Ethiopian community in Israel and what feelings it will arouse in them.”
Our lives and histories are interconnected in mysterious ways, on a cultural and personal level. The difficulties of translation may sometimes bring us closer to the text, as in the story “Madman, Killer, Saint, You…” in which a seriously injured political activist is hospitalized, his accusers await his recovery so that they can force him to reveal information, and he asks the attending physician to help him escape this fate by assisting his death. In contemplating this dilemma the doctor reflects on his younger brother, also a political activist, and the male nurse also plays a central role. In translating the story Parnes was confronted with a problem “because Hebrew has this thing you are stuck with – the same word means “brother” and “nurse”. I was afraid it would be confusing, so I wrote “head nurse” and as the story continued I slowly removed the word “head”. Having established the identity of the character as a nurse in the hospital, Parnes gave himself the freedom to let the word and its dual associations work in the reader’s mind.
I feel that it is this kind of relationship to the text that Benjamin had in mind when he referred to a translation as revealing the relationships between languages, one that can extend to cultures and the individuals within them. To paraphrase Benjamin, Parnes’ translation of Hama Tuma reminds us that “people” are “not strangers to one another…but are interrelated in what they want to express.”
Book Launching: “The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories”
By Hama Tuma, Translated by Dori Parnes, Ahuzat Bayit 2009–06–21
21 June 2009
Written by: Ayelet Dekel
“Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.”
Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator”
Western culture has a penchant for worshipping the exotic from a safe myopic distance, overlooking the human reality rubbing up against its elbows and knees, unintentionally creating cross-cultural connections comical, frustrating, and inspirational all at once. Israel, literally and figuratively, finds itself somewhere between Europe and Africa. The “people of the Book”, are currently celebrating “Book Week” with hundreds of new titles on display in all the major cities. Despite Israel’s considerable Ethiopian population, the only work of fiction (to the best of this writer’s knowledge) published by an Ethiopian writer this year is Hama Tuma’s The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories, translated by Dori Parnes (Ahuzat Bayit 2009). Activist writer-in-exile Hama Tuma’s book is out of print and essentially unavailable in English, and has never been officially published in Ethiopia in either Amharic or English, so if you want to read this brilliantly funny, sensitive, intelligent portrayal of life under Mengistu’s reign of terror, start learning Hebrew.
The book is written in two parts, each consisting of eleven stories. The stories in the first part are all written as court cases, described by a narrator, able to observe and comment, yet not personally involved in the proceedings. This distance allows an ironic humor to permeate the text, as translator Dori Parnes recounts, “The first thing that grabbed me was his humor…then you suddenly reach the second half – it grabs you by the throat. These are the same stories but he tells them with pain.” Hama Tuma, who has been a political activist for freedom and human rights since his student days in the 1960s, “stumbled” into fiction writing when he responded to a BBC call for short stories.
“Vendetta”, the opening story of the book’s second part, was his first work of fiction, growing out of the painful experiences of life under Mengistu’s regime, and the moral dilemmas with which people had to contend on a daily basis. Translator Parnes says of “Vendetta”: “I was stunned when I finished translating it. It wipes the smile off your face and you say to yourself – what was it that I smiled at before?” “Most of it has not been written,” says Hama Tuma of this period in Ethiopian history, “What really happened, happened in a worse way.”
The Hebrew edition is prefaced by Professor Hagai Erlich’s eloquent introduction, providing an historical perspective on the revolution in Ethiopia which began in hope and culminated in oppression. Comparing Mengistu’s reign to that of Stalin, Hitler and Sadam Hussein, Erlich notes that a key to the success of these regimes lay in their ability to release the potential “little Stalin” and “little Adolf” lurking within any of us, and let them take over the hearts and minds of the people. As it happens, while he was translating the book, Parnes read Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia based on personal archives and interviews. Parnes says, “What 50 years of that government did to a people is more terrible than what Hitler did in 12 years. People were born into it. The books complement one another, I didn’t have much comfort between the two…When you read one and translate the other, your dreams at night are not very pleasant.”
“A lot of people collaborated out of fear,” says Hama Tuma, “They denounced others or didn’t help. It is a sad part of our history, we should live it as such, or else nothing is learned. I offer my stories as a suggestion: we should look for another way of solving the problems.” Hama Tuma’s stories penetrate the heart, mind and dreams. His humor is grounded in unflinching honesty, nurtured by a wellspring of hope, a sense of fun and mischief: “to prick their serious balloons.”
Parnes originally translated two of Hama Tuma’s stories at the request of Doron Tavory, artistic director of Hazira Performing Arts Center, for a stage adaptation to be performed by the Netela Theatre Company. “It suddenly aroused my curiosity,” says Parnes, who went to great lengths to acquire a copy of the book, feeling, “there is something here that seems to me important.” In his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Walter Benjamin discusses the way that a translation reveals the hidden connections between languages, saying that a good translation will bring some of the “foreign,” of the other language and culture into the text of the target language. Reading his translation inspired my own quest to locate the author, as described in “Finding Hama.”
The relationship between Israel and Ethiopia is ancient and current, certainly complex. The Ethiopian monarchy considered themselves descendents of King Solomon and the Jewish community there, known as Beta Israel, has ancient roots. Israelis are also mentioned in the book as having trained the Ethiopian military in interrogation techniques. As Parnes notes, “Our excellent young men went to give them all sorts of tips…Why must Israel be involved in the ugliest things?” This journey from Addis Abbaba, through Paris, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv brings forth a work of fiction in Hebrew that makes Ethiopia a more vivid part of our lives, to reflect on Israel’s relationship to Ethiopia and by extension, the situation of Ethiopian Israelis. Says Parnes, “I am curious to know if the book will reach the members of the Ethiopian community in Israel and what feelings it will arouse in them.”
Our lives and histories are interconnected in mysterious ways, on a cultural and personal level. The difficulties of translation may sometimes bring us closer to the text, as in the story “Madman, Killer, Saint, You…” in which a seriously injured political activist is hospitalized, his accusers await his recovery so that they can force him to reveal information, and he asks the attending physician to help him escape this fate by assisting his death. In contemplating this dilemma the doctor reflects on his younger brother, also a political activist, and the male nurse also plays a central role. In translating the story Parnes was confronted with a problem “because Hebrew has this thing you are stuck with – the same word means “brother” and “nurse”. I was afraid it would be confusing, so I wrote “head nurse” and as the story continued I slowly removed the word “head”. Having established the identity of the character as a nurse in the hospital, Parnes gave himself the freedom to let the word and its dual associations work in the reader’s mind.
I feel that it is this kind of relationship to the text that Benjamin had in mind when he referred to a translation as revealing the relationships between languages, one that can extend to cultures and the individuals within them. To paraphrase Benjamin, Parnes’ translation of Hama Tuma reminds us that “people” are “not strangers to one another…but are interrelated in what they want to express.”
Book Launching: “The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories”
By Hama Tuma, Translated by Dori Parnes, Ahuzat Bayit 2009–06–21
NEW BOOK PUBLISHED
HAMA TUMA'S FOURTH AFRICAN ABSURDITIES BOOK HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED. TITLED WHY DON'T THEY EAT COLTAN? IT CONTINUES IN THE TRADITION OF THE PREVIOUS THREE WITH BITING SATIRE AND CRITICISM OF THE POWERS THAT HAVE MADE OUR LIVES SO MISERABLE.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Tragedy of Remaining a Slave
THE TRAGEDY OF REMAINING A SLAVE
Hama Tuma
"Education for colonial people must inevitably mean unrest and revolt; therefore, had to be limited and used to inculcate obedience and servility lest the whole system be overthrown."
W. E. B. Du Bois
"It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude."
Frantz Fanon
"White is right
Yellow mellow
Black, get back!"
Langston Hughes
Diatribe it is not. Certainly not vitriolic. Anger at a sad situation? Maybe. Fury at our inability to be free? Perhaps. The whole thing was spurred by me seeing a security guard at a super market asking (once again) a black man to open his bag for inspection.
Africans who live in Paris know a particular African species, black of course, often bald and muscular, sometimes puffed up but still looking less menacing and more pathetic, dressed in a cheap standard issue black suit, sometimes wearing dark sunglasses, often found at the doors of super markets and department stores. Maybe the species exists elsewhere. This is no African to be categorized as a paperless émigré, a street cleaner, a frightened unemployed soul, the majority, as it were, in the increasingly unwelcoming capital that Paris has become. This special species is the security guard, the keeper of His Masters gates, a trusted mastiff, underpaid but still proud--he has a job and he has his working papers in order. Two valuable things that thousands other Africans do not have at all. These guards and elderly white women share the same phobia --they fear the African. In the Metro or in the buses, if an African stands close to her, the elderly white woman will usually hold her purse tighter after casting a fearful glance towards him. The black, often African, security guard will also stare at the African entering the supermarket or the department store, follow him with his eyes and more often than not accost him as he leaves to ask him to open and show the contents of his bag just as (or while) the whites, some of whom may have indulged in shoplifting away from the prying eyes of the camera, calmly walk out. "Good day Bwana, Have a nice day Sir, Please open the bag!"-- This last one addressed to the African, of course. At the airport, the black policeman or woman soften stop the black person and rarely dare to do the same with the white ones.
It is all connected to the colonization of the mind, an inculcated self hatred and inferiority complex. There is no denying that the slave trade and colonialism ruined Africa to no end and that the wounds open up even today to debilitate Africa's search for development and overall progress. That said, it is equally true that all of Africa's woes cannot be traced back to those two evils even though 50 years after the so called independence from colonialism, the enslaved African bourgeoisie owes its rottenness and lack of nationalism to the colonial (mis)-- education and formation. Colonialism was wanton murder but it was really worse than that. True that Germans almost wiped out the Herero in Namibia, the French killed thousands over thousands in the Maghreb, the British committed heinous crimes in Kenya and in their colonies, the Belgians slaughtered 15 million Congolese, Mussolini killed at least one million Ethiopians as he attempted to colonize Ethiopia, but all this and other crimes pale when it comes to the crime of the colonization of the minds of millions of Africans. The former passed, the latter crime still persists. Slave owners of America called it seasoning, the deculturization process that knew no end, leading to total subservience of the mind and the acceptance of the slave holder's beliefs. The slave hated himself or herself, his culture, his blackness, his name his, kinky hair, lips and nose and in general his very being. This variety of "epistemic violence", as some call it, afflicted many colonized Africans and Indians too. Structurally, British colonial control over India ended a longtime ago but the British left "persons, Indian in blood and color, but British in taste, in opinions, morals and in intellect". Indian society worships the white skin, hates black and millions of the untouchables are, yes, quite black. In Kenya, a typical example was the Attorney General Charles Njonjo who assumed he was British and refused to shake hands with ordinary Kenyans thereby provoking the anger of Kenyan students who, when they demonstrated, often held placards calling on Njonjo to " Go Home to England!". And they were not joking at all.
Brainwashing is another word for it, massive brainwashing or what some have called "menticide". Mental colonialism as the Iranian Jalal Al-e Almadi argued in his book Occidentosis. It has afflicted most colonized peoples. African Americans had to struggle against "seasoning" to decolonize their minds, to realize that black is also beautiful. It took a long time and is still not victorious. Even James Baldwin, as Eldridge Cleaver put it in his "Soul on Ice", could himself qualify as a "reluctant black", Malcolm X and others had to spend hours "conking" their hairs. The struggle for national liberation in Africa was not accompanied by a cultural struggle that was just as fierce. The African leaders and ruling elite left in power by colonialism were black in colour but white at heart and in desire. The Western companies that make skin lightening creams and lotions profit millions in Africa and India as their products spread skin diseases and reinforce the feeling of self loathing. Having a pale or white skin has become a must. Many colonized people bleach their skins, want to identify themselves with the colonial entity, are ashamed of their origin and punish their hairs. The French refer to light skinned blacks as the "saved colors" (couleur sauvé) meaning saved by a miracle from the disaster that would have been "being black". Even in Ethiopia, where colonialism never took place, we talk of color of various hues, differentiating Ethiopians as black, red and brown--ignorance being bliss and you can imagine what color is frowned upon. Wearing wigs over kinky hairs has earned millions for wig makers (Comedian Chris Rock has made an interesting film on the hair issue amidst African Americans). And the African male is accused of going wild for blondes fulfilling the white stereotype of ages--the black man yearning and lusting for blue eyed blondes. We are the eternal King Kongs, no? This is the most serious colonial crime committed on Africa--the colonization of our minds, now continued by the West under new forms. The African yearns to be a caricature of the white, to ape the white man's culture, to have little or no self respect. We do not even consider ourselves able to express our woes and look up to self appointed stars and foreign self declared do-gooders to voice our plight and find us some solutions. The African was colonized and now he himself, devoid of an independent mind, continues with his own colonization, perpetuates negritude.
I am, however, of the opinion that Afro centrist positions often reflect, albeit in reverse and at times unwittingly, the base inferiority complex that characterizes the colonized mind. We do not have to insist that everything under the sun originated with the black person or in Africa to be proud of our heritage. Mobutu launched the authenticité campaign and changed his name from Joseph Desiree Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Wazabanga but that did little to change his colonized mind or state of servility to the West. Civilization, what is right, progress and what is or is not modern are all relative and not always white. The concept of the mind as an occupied territory, this same mind becoming the enemy within of the assimilated "natives", filled with self contempt, who imbibe the education of the colonizer (language and all) and become carbon copies of the colonizer highlights the confusion and debilitating trauma and tension the colonized have to live under. Ngugi wa Thiongo, in his book "The Decolonization of the Mind", raises the problem as it relates to language and the dominance of English. He argues that writers should write in their native languages as a means of decolonization of the mind. How far is the relevance and even importance of Western education? Should the African elite feel proud and gloat just because, as one Western African put it, he has "sat at the foot of the white man and drank from the fountain of knowledge" in some Western university and got a degree. And yet the resort to what is generally known as tradition is fraught with deadly mines. Automatic deliverance is not offered--actually this solution may be worse than the problem in many instances. Harmful traditions are many; the overall rejection of all that is labeled Western (what is really Western and not universal?) could also be disastrous. After all the Taliban mind is not decolonized, they and the likes of the Somali Al Shabab, who rile against music, sports and the rights of women and decapitate, stone or throw acid at the faces of young girls going to school, are not a better deal over the colonized mind. Choose your poison.
Hence, the black security guards and policemen who tend to believe that all blacks are first class suspects are not to be blamed--they need to be pitied. Next time you go to a supermarket or a department store, do open your bags voluntarily to give the black security guards articles and books on the need to decolonize our minds. It is tragic to stay a slave and not know it at all. Fifty years after mostly fake independence, the real liberation of Africa demands an end to servility and to the colonization of our minds.
Hama Tuma
"Education for colonial people must inevitably mean unrest and revolt; therefore, had to be limited and used to inculcate obedience and servility lest the whole system be overthrown."
W. E. B. Du Bois
"It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude."
Frantz Fanon
"White is right
Yellow mellow
Black, get back!"
Langston Hughes
Diatribe it is not. Certainly not vitriolic. Anger at a sad situation? Maybe. Fury at our inability to be free? Perhaps. The whole thing was spurred by me seeing a security guard at a super market asking (once again) a black man to open his bag for inspection.
Africans who live in Paris know a particular African species, black of course, often bald and muscular, sometimes puffed up but still looking less menacing and more pathetic, dressed in a cheap standard issue black suit, sometimes wearing dark sunglasses, often found at the doors of super markets and department stores. Maybe the species exists elsewhere. This is no African to be categorized as a paperless émigré, a street cleaner, a frightened unemployed soul, the majority, as it were, in the increasingly unwelcoming capital that Paris has become. This special species is the security guard, the keeper of His Masters gates, a trusted mastiff, underpaid but still proud--he has a job and he has his working papers in order. Two valuable things that thousands other Africans do not have at all. These guards and elderly white women share the same phobia --they fear the African. In the Metro or in the buses, if an African stands close to her, the elderly white woman will usually hold her purse tighter after casting a fearful glance towards him. The black, often African, security guard will also stare at the African entering the supermarket or the department store, follow him with his eyes and more often than not accost him as he leaves to ask him to open and show the contents of his bag just as (or while) the whites, some of whom may have indulged in shoplifting away from the prying eyes of the camera, calmly walk out. "Good day Bwana, Have a nice day Sir, Please open the bag!"-- This last one addressed to the African, of course. At the airport, the black policeman or woman soften stop the black person and rarely dare to do the same with the white ones.
It is all connected to the colonization of the mind, an inculcated self hatred and inferiority complex. There is no denying that the slave trade and colonialism ruined Africa to no end and that the wounds open up even today to debilitate Africa's search for development and overall progress. That said, it is equally true that all of Africa's woes cannot be traced back to those two evils even though 50 years after the so called independence from colonialism, the enslaved African bourgeoisie owes its rottenness and lack of nationalism to the colonial (mis)-- education and formation. Colonialism was wanton murder but it was really worse than that. True that Germans almost wiped out the Herero in Namibia, the French killed thousands over thousands in the Maghreb, the British committed heinous crimes in Kenya and in their colonies, the Belgians slaughtered 15 million Congolese, Mussolini killed at least one million Ethiopians as he attempted to colonize Ethiopia, but all this and other crimes pale when it comes to the crime of the colonization of the minds of millions of Africans. The former passed, the latter crime still persists. Slave owners of America called it seasoning, the deculturization process that knew no end, leading to total subservience of the mind and the acceptance of the slave holder's beliefs. The slave hated himself or herself, his culture, his blackness, his name his, kinky hair, lips and nose and in general his very being. This variety of "epistemic violence", as some call it, afflicted many colonized Africans and Indians too. Structurally, British colonial control over India ended a longtime ago but the British left "persons, Indian in blood and color, but British in taste, in opinions, morals and in intellect". Indian society worships the white skin, hates black and millions of the untouchables are, yes, quite black. In Kenya, a typical example was the Attorney General Charles Njonjo who assumed he was British and refused to shake hands with ordinary Kenyans thereby provoking the anger of Kenyan students who, when they demonstrated, often held placards calling on Njonjo to " Go Home to England!". And they were not joking at all.
Brainwashing is another word for it, massive brainwashing or what some have called "menticide". Mental colonialism as the Iranian Jalal Al-e Almadi argued in his book Occidentosis. It has afflicted most colonized peoples. African Americans had to struggle against "seasoning" to decolonize their minds, to realize that black is also beautiful. It took a long time and is still not victorious. Even James Baldwin, as Eldridge Cleaver put it in his "Soul on Ice", could himself qualify as a "reluctant black", Malcolm X and others had to spend hours "conking" their hairs. The struggle for national liberation in Africa was not accompanied by a cultural struggle that was just as fierce. The African leaders and ruling elite left in power by colonialism were black in colour but white at heart and in desire. The Western companies that make skin lightening creams and lotions profit millions in Africa and India as their products spread skin diseases and reinforce the feeling of self loathing. Having a pale or white skin has become a must. Many colonized people bleach their skins, want to identify themselves with the colonial entity, are ashamed of their origin and punish their hairs. The French refer to light skinned blacks as the "saved colors" (couleur sauvé) meaning saved by a miracle from the disaster that would have been "being black". Even in Ethiopia, where colonialism never took place, we talk of color of various hues, differentiating Ethiopians as black, red and brown--ignorance being bliss and you can imagine what color is frowned upon. Wearing wigs over kinky hairs has earned millions for wig makers (Comedian Chris Rock has made an interesting film on the hair issue amidst African Americans). And the African male is accused of going wild for blondes fulfilling the white stereotype of ages--the black man yearning and lusting for blue eyed blondes. We are the eternal King Kongs, no? This is the most serious colonial crime committed on Africa--the colonization of our minds, now continued by the West under new forms. The African yearns to be a caricature of the white, to ape the white man's culture, to have little or no self respect. We do not even consider ourselves able to express our woes and look up to self appointed stars and foreign self declared do-gooders to voice our plight and find us some solutions. The African was colonized and now he himself, devoid of an independent mind, continues with his own colonization, perpetuates negritude.
I am, however, of the opinion that Afro centrist positions often reflect, albeit in reverse and at times unwittingly, the base inferiority complex that characterizes the colonized mind. We do not have to insist that everything under the sun originated with the black person or in Africa to be proud of our heritage. Mobutu launched the authenticité campaign and changed his name from Joseph Desiree Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Wazabanga but that did little to change his colonized mind or state of servility to the West. Civilization, what is right, progress and what is or is not modern are all relative and not always white. The concept of the mind as an occupied territory, this same mind becoming the enemy within of the assimilated "natives", filled with self contempt, who imbibe the education of the colonizer (language and all) and become carbon copies of the colonizer highlights the confusion and debilitating trauma and tension the colonized have to live under. Ngugi wa Thiongo, in his book "The Decolonization of the Mind", raises the problem as it relates to language and the dominance of English. He argues that writers should write in their native languages as a means of decolonization of the mind. How far is the relevance and even importance of Western education? Should the African elite feel proud and gloat just because, as one Western African put it, he has "sat at the foot of the white man and drank from the fountain of knowledge" in some Western university and got a degree. And yet the resort to what is generally known as tradition is fraught with deadly mines. Automatic deliverance is not offered--actually this solution may be worse than the problem in many instances. Harmful traditions are many; the overall rejection of all that is labeled Western (what is really Western and not universal?) could also be disastrous. After all the Taliban mind is not decolonized, they and the likes of the Somali Al Shabab, who rile against music, sports and the rights of women and decapitate, stone or throw acid at the faces of young girls going to school, are not a better deal over the colonized mind. Choose your poison.
Hence, the black security guards and policemen who tend to believe that all blacks are first class suspects are not to be blamed--they need to be pitied. Next time you go to a supermarket or a department store, do open your bags voluntarily to give the black security guards articles and books on the need to decolonize our minds. It is tragic to stay a slave and not know it at all. Fifty years after mostly fake independence, the real liberation of Africa demands an end to servility and to the colonization of our minds.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Letter sent to Columbia University president
Office of the President.
Columbia University,
New York.
SIR,
i am an Ethiopian writer and some years back I had presented my book in your university. I am addressing to you this protest letter following the announcement that Columbia University has invited the bloody Ethiopian tyrant to make a key note address on African leadership. What makes the matter worse is the eulogy made by the university concerning the dictator,presenting him as an innovator and falsely declaring that Ethiopia has progressed under his leadership and that of his TPLF cabal.
Meles Zenawi, the predator of the free press, is responsible for genocide in Gambella, massacres in the Ogaden, Water, Adebabaye Iyesus, Anwar mosque and many other places. He holds close to 35,000 political prisoners including Judge Ms Birtukan Midiksa, has disappeared dozens of political dissidents including Ms Aberash Berta and Tsegaye Gebre Medhin. Torture is routine and very very cruel and inhuman punishments the norm. In 2005, Meles had more than 200 people killed in Addis Abeba because they legitimately protested against his rigging the general election. Mels Zenawi presides over an ethnic organization and practices discriminatory ethnic politics. There is little in the record of this gross human rights violator that calls for admiration and , hence, the surprise and indignation at the whitewashed presentation of the tyrant by Columbia University.
As an Ethiopian and as a citizen struggling for democracy in Ethiopia,I strongly protest against the invitation made by the University to the dictator Meles. It is an injustice and a sad example of supporting a dictator to the detriment of millions of people who are repressed now but will surely rise in the near future to get rid of the dictatorship.
Stand on the side of justice, human rights and solidarity with oppressed peoples.
regards.
Hama Tuma
Columbia University,
New York.
SIR,
i am an Ethiopian writer and some years back I had presented my book in your university. I am addressing to you this protest letter following the announcement that Columbia University has invited the bloody Ethiopian tyrant to make a key note address on African leadership. What makes the matter worse is the eulogy made by the university concerning the dictator,presenting him as an innovator and falsely declaring that Ethiopia has progressed under his leadership and that of his TPLF cabal.
Meles Zenawi, the predator of the free press, is responsible for genocide in Gambella, massacres in the Ogaden, Water, Adebabaye Iyesus, Anwar mosque and many other places. He holds close to 35,000 political prisoners including Judge Ms Birtukan Midiksa, has disappeared dozens of political dissidents including Ms Aberash Berta and Tsegaye Gebre Medhin. Torture is routine and very very cruel and inhuman punishments the norm. In 2005, Meles had more than 200 people killed in Addis Abeba because they legitimately protested against his rigging the general election. Mels Zenawi presides over an ethnic organization and practices discriminatory ethnic politics. There is little in the record of this gross human rights violator that calls for admiration and , hence, the surprise and indignation at the whitewashed presentation of the tyrant by Columbia University.
As an Ethiopian and as a citizen struggling for democracy in Ethiopia,I strongly protest against the invitation made by the University to the dictator Meles. It is an injustice and a sad example of supporting a dictator to the detriment of millions of people who are repressed now but will surely rise in the near future to get rid of the dictatorship.
Stand on the side of justice, human rights and solidarity with oppressed peoples.
regards.
Hama Tuma
Saturday, September 4, 2010
of Gadafi and Arab Racism
OF COLONEL GADAFI AND ARAB RACISM
"We don't know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans,"( Col Gaddafi said in Rome, August 30/ 2010.
Arab racism to wards Africans has for long been taboo subject--it is politically incorrect to even say that Arabs who are Moslems are racists to boot and consider Africans--Moslem or Christian it does not matter- as inferior.
Reference is made to the Genesis and the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem with Arabs claiming that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyed Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome Arabs with beautiful face and hair.” Arab philosophers also laid the ground for the racism of their kin towards Africans and all blacks. Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/ scientist in Islam, described blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men is abeed (slave) stock.” He equated black people with “rats plaguing the earth.”
Ibn Khaldum, revered especially by Algerians, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.” Al-Dimashqi, often described as an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbered among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..” Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani said of black people: “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”
Colonel Gadafi of Libya has continued in this tradition albeit masquerading as a Pan Africanist though he has been attempting since the early 70s to Arabize Africa.
Gadafi may not be an honorable man but he sure is a desperate man. He paid two hundred Italian female models 70 to 80 Euros each to listen to his lecture on Islam and his infamous Green Book. He told them quite blatantly that "Islam should become the religion of Europe" and gave them free copies of the Koran, after he had lectured them for an hour on the "freedoms" enjoyed by women in Libya. Where does one find women who are free in Libya? Is he referring to the majority forced to wrap themselves up like burritos in black covering dresses in the stifling heat? Or to the majority of women beaten as a matter of routine by the males including his notorious son Seif al Islam who has already shamed himself in Genève and Paris as a criminal spoiled brat? And then again, Gadafi may be called a realist in that he knew not many people would voluntarily come to his lectures unless they get paid. For a vain dictator that he is, this is a commendable foresight and grasp of the cruel reality of his cheap worth especially when compared to other dictators who relish and wallow in their own lies and propaganda.
It is all a matter of perspective and having a modem of respect for the truth, for numbers, for the people and Africa as a whole. For all his claims to the contrary, Gadafi has no respect for Africa and Africans. This is not just manifested by how he treats African workers and asylum seekers (very, very inhumanely), nor by his self declaration as the King of All African tribes but mainly by his deeply ingrained chauvinism and pretension to be an African Messiah. No wonder he refers to Africans as starved and ignorant and violates the rights of Africans in Libya. Gadafi, in his recent visit to Rome, even went as far warning Europeans to beware of the starving and ignorant barbarians: "We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions." The desert prisons of Libya (some just containers for goods) are filled with African asylum seekers. Algeria refers to blacks as Kahlusha and black Africans are spat upon in many Algerian cities. The same is true in Morocco and Tunisia. Mauritania, its majority black and its minority considering itself as Arab, still has the salve system in place as was the case in Southern Sudan where the "natives" were compared to "haiwanin" (animals) by the self declared Arab North. The same so called Arab Sudanese are considered as abeed or slave in Saudi Arabia. The claim that Muslims cannot be racist is debunked in the Holy Land of Moslems itself where Africans on the Hajj pilgrimage are victimized by Arab racism and contempt. Lebanon has time and again shown its ugly racism towards Africans in its vile treatment of domestic workers from Ethiopia and other African countries. This crude racism was in evidence when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed just off Beirut and the Lebanese authorities ignored the Ethiopian victims and their relatives and focused on the few Lebanese who were aboard. Even Arab Sudanese were called Nubian monkeys by the Lebanese police at one time. Egypt, itself an African country calling itself Arab, the Nubians and all blacks are discriminated against. Anwar Sadat was not happy when he heard a film on his life would have an African American actor portraying him and the late Hassan II of Morocco was never amused by a reference to his black ancestry.
Arabs think they are superior and exhibit racism towards Africans. This is the undeniable truth. Let alone white skinned Arabs even the black skinned ones (Sudan for example) consider themselves superior by virtue of their self declared Arab identity. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia hoodwinked Gadafi and got Libyan aid during the struggle against Mengistu by assuring Gadafi that Ethiopians are Arabs, Zenawi (Meles' father) a Yemenite and that Ethiopia under Meles will join the Arab League. Over the years Libya has been accused of racism and of officially provoking the beating and killing of African migrants. Gadafi's pan African pretensions have always appeared shoddy and hollow as a consequence and his recent statement in Europe-- calling Africans ignorant and barbarian invaders-- has nailed his coffin as an Arab racist. Gadafi has brutally deported thousands of Africans and Saudi Arabia is doing the same every week. The degenerate Sheikhs and princes (who drink alcohol and maintain harems) have hypocritically been subjecting blacks to cruel punishment on flimsy charges of drinking alcohol, adultery and what have you. An Ethiopian woman was hanged in public in Riyadh a few years back while Saudi women who beat up and throw acid at the faces of African domestic workers have never been charged or tried. How many black skinned Libyans, Omanis, Saudis, Algerians and Moroccans hold high positions of government in their own respective countries?
There was a time early in his reign when the young colonel was somewhat funny with his proposal of unity to all and sundry countries with Sicily excepted, his female bodyguards, his tent palace, and his air of a true Bedouin lost in oil and a modern century. But that time has passed. Gadafi the racist has for long been also Gadafi the dictator, killing off his opponents both inside and outside the country, financing the likes of Fode Sankoh in Sierra Leone and meddling in the affairs of other countries like Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Liberia, etc. During his Rome visit recently , Gadafi asked the EU for 5 billion Euros to block black Africans from Invading Europe and turning the continent into "another Africa" ( that is for Gadafi into a continent of starving and ignorant black barbarians). Yet, he told Europeans to open their doors to rich Libyans and offered to the Italian female models he paid to attend his lecture that he can find them Libyan husbands so that they can be free like Libyan women. We can still take all this as funny but his alliance with Berlusconi has not augured well for Africans. Gadafi in not funny, no--he is just a pathetic racist Arab who should be shunned by all of Africa.
"We don't know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans,"( Col Gaddafi said in Rome, August 30/ 2010.
Arab racism to wards Africans has for long been taboo subject--it is politically incorrect to even say that Arabs who are Moslems are racists to boot and consider Africans--Moslem or Christian it does not matter- as inferior.
Reference is made to the Genesis and the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem with Arabs claiming that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyed Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome Arabs with beautiful face and hair.” Arab philosophers also laid the ground for the racism of their kin towards Africans and all blacks. Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/ scientist in Islam, described blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men is abeed (slave) stock.” He equated black people with “rats plaguing the earth.”
Ibn Khaldum, revered especially by Algerians, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.” Al-Dimashqi, often described as an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbered among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..” Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani said of black people: “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”
Colonel Gadafi of Libya has continued in this tradition albeit masquerading as a Pan Africanist though he has been attempting since the early 70s to Arabize Africa.
Gadafi may not be an honorable man but he sure is a desperate man. He paid two hundred Italian female models 70 to 80 Euros each to listen to his lecture on Islam and his infamous Green Book. He told them quite blatantly that "Islam should become the religion of Europe" and gave them free copies of the Koran, after he had lectured them for an hour on the "freedoms" enjoyed by women in Libya. Where does one find women who are free in Libya? Is he referring to the majority forced to wrap themselves up like burritos in black covering dresses in the stifling heat? Or to the majority of women beaten as a matter of routine by the males including his notorious son Seif al Islam who has already shamed himself in Genève and Paris as a criminal spoiled brat? And then again, Gadafi may be called a realist in that he knew not many people would voluntarily come to his lectures unless they get paid. For a vain dictator that he is, this is a commendable foresight and grasp of the cruel reality of his cheap worth especially when compared to other dictators who relish and wallow in their own lies and propaganda.
It is all a matter of perspective and having a modem of respect for the truth, for numbers, for the people and Africa as a whole. For all his claims to the contrary, Gadafi has no respect for Africa and Africans. This is not just manifested by how he treats African workers and asylum seekers (very, very inhumanely), nor by his self declaration as the King of All African tribes but mainly by his deeply ingrained chauvinism and pretension to be an African Messiah. No wonder he refers to Africans as starved and ignorant and violates the rights of Africans in Libya. Gadafi, in his recent visit to Rome, even went as far warning Europeans to beware of the starving and ignorant barbarians: "We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions." The desert prisons of Libya (some just containers for goods) are filled with African asylum seekers. Algeria refers to blacks as Kahlusha and black Africans are spat upon in many Algerian cities. The same is true in Morocco and Tunisia. Mauritania, its majority black and its minority considering itself as Arab, still has the salve system in place as was the case in Southern Sudan where the "natives" were compared to "haiwanin" (animals) by the self declared Arab North. The same so called Arab Sudanese are considered as abeed or slave in Saudi Arabia. The claim that Muslims cannot be racist is debunked in the Holy Land of Moslems itself where Africans on the Hajj pilgrimage are victimized by Arab racism and contempt. Lebanon has time and again shown its ugly racism towards Africans in its vile treatment of domestic workers from Ethiopia and other African countries. This crude racism was in evidence when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed just off Beirut and the Lebanese authorities ignored the Ethiopian victims and their relatives and focused on the few Lebanese who were aboard. Even Arab Sudanese were called Nubian monkeys by the Lebanese police at one time. Egypt, itself an African country calling itself Arab, the Nubians and all blacks are discriminated against. Anwar Sadat was not happy when he heard a film on his life would have an African American actor portraying him and the late Hassan II of Morocco was never amused by a reference to his black ancestry.
Arabs think they are superior and exhibit racism towards Africans. This is the undeniable truth. Let alone white skinned Arabs even the black skinned ones (Sudan for example) consider themselves superior by virtue of their self declared Arab identity. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia hoodwinked Gadafi and got Libyan aid during the struggle against Mengistu by assuring Gadafi that Ethiopians are Arabs, Zenawi (Meles' father) a Yemenite and that Ethiopia under Meles will join the Arab League. Over the years Libya has been accused of racism and of officially provoking the beating and killing of African migrants. Gadafi's pan African pretensions have always appeared shoddy and hollow as a consequence and his recent statement in Europe-- calling Africans ignorant and barbarian invaders-- has nailed his coffin as an Arab racist. Gadafi has brutally deported thousands of Africans and Saudi Arabia is doing the same every week. The degenerate Sheikhs and princes (who drink alcohol and maintain harems) have hypocritically been subjecting blacks to cruel punishment on flimsy charges of drinking alcohol, adultery and what have you. An Ethiopian woman was hanged in public in Riyadh a few years back while Saudi women who beat up and throw acid at the faces of African domestic workers have never been charged or tried. How many black skinned Libyans, Omanis, Saudis, Algerians and Moroccans hold high positions of government in their own respective countries?
There was a time early in his reign when the young colonel was somewhat funny with his proposal of unity to all and sundry countries with Sicily excepted, his female bodyguards, his tent palace, and his air of a true Bedouin lost in oil and a modern century. But that time has passed. Gadafi the racist has for long been also Gadafi the dictator, killing off his opponents both inside and outside the country, financing the likes of Fode Sankoh in Sierra Leone and meddling in the affairs of other countries like Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Liberia, etc. During his Rome visit recently , Gadafi asked the EU for 5 billion Euros to block black Africans from Invading Europe and turning the continent into "another Africa" ( that is for Gadafi into a continent of starving and ignorant black barbarians). Yet, he told Europeans to open their doors to rich Libyans and offered to the Italian female models he paid to attend his lecture that he can find them Libyan husbands so that they can be free like Libyan women. We can still take all this as funny but his alliance with Berlusconi has not augured well for Africans. Gadafi in not funny, no--he is just a pathetic racist Arab who should be shunned by all of Africa.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Are Despots Intelligent?
ARE DESPOTS INTELLIGENT?
Or (Forgive Me for Asking)
IS MELES ZENAWI INTELLIGENT?
This is really a joke, a pastime actually as dictator and intelligent are oxymoron. Sort of an idiot Savant, a fine mess, a little pregnant, accurate rumors. An Amhara Weyane and abundant poverty. Of late some quarters have insisted on calling the tyrant in Addis Abeba intelligent at a time when he is blatantly rigging an election while at the same time insisting on calling Robert Mugabe a blundering fool. When Idi Amin of Uganda was engineered by Britain and Israel to stage his coup against "Socialist" Milton Obote the British media was quick to mention and even praise his "native" intelligence. Native was the code word used for covering up "almost illiterate brute soldier of British colonialism". Toe the line and you will be called intelligent.
The whole charade stems from two sources or motivations: the fist one being that notorious racist prejudice which makes a coherent black person intelligent, "surprise, surprise the Kaffir boy knows how to talk at least!". Or as the surprised Italian fascist officer said in a famous Ethiopian poem: "I saw the blacks eating like human beings" sort of surprise. In my own experience I have met this monster many times, with my listeners being surprised that I could explain the situation in my country and Africa as a whole and even debate with them. Without being cruel I have to state it is like the monkey doing new tricks very well, the ape speaks English and he can hold his own in a debate, hallelujah! And thus every street smart smooth talker becomes an intelligent person, with qualifications of course. As Santiago Carrillo, the late leader of the Spanish CP said it, "to ask for Western type democracy in countries like Ethiopia and Vietnam is to bray at the moon". He was arguing that Ethiopians have to make do with a brutal colonel called Mengistu and his fake democracy as Carrillo, a pro Soviet to boot, was supporting the tyrant backed by Moscow. Thus, intelligent is by our own reduced standard, no one is comparing Meles with even any joke of a western miserable leader, mind you. The tyrants have used this prejudice to their own advantage as expected, they wear their Yes Bwana smile as a permanent fixture, they do the slave dance to perfection ( as Meles did sometime ago backing Sarkozy and Obama and betraying Africa in Copenhagen), repeat the buzz words that please the ears of the donors and, presto or voila, whichever you prefer, they or he appear as intelligent. When they say Meles is intelligent they do not mean he is crafty, devious, sneaky, able to hide his ignorance, intriguer, cruel, and a docile puppet, no. Meles said give me an opposition lest I become corrupt with absolute power and they clapped (intelligent was the cry). The dictator of Turkmenistan was one step ahead as he said: there are no opposition parties so how can I give them freedom? An intelligent chap!
The second reason for some calling these depots intelligent is because they are their puppets, instruments of neo colonial domination, and their mercenaries. Albert Camus called an intellectual an unsuccessful idiot and the late Walter Rodney defined the dictator as follows:
"A dictator is defined as one who elevates himself above all other citizens and often makes claims to be closer to God than mere mortals. Emperors, kings and nobles of the feudal period easily became dictators because they could justify despotic acts on the grounds that royal power and authority were of sacred origin. In more modern versions of dictatorship, the absolute ruler has to fabricate an elaborate cult of the personality to prove that he is more intelligent, more potent and generally superior to any other human being. Idi Amin fancied himself not only a physical giant but also as an intellectual giant. Besides, he boasted of a direct line to Allah. Eric Gairy, our Caribbean ex-dictator, dabbled in obeah and convinced himself that he was better than the world's leading scientists and would personally solve the problem of unidentified flying objects. This is the stuff of which dictators are made". Not intelligence at all unless one mistakes vulgar notions and instinct for intelligence.
Back in 2008 TV personality Barbara Walters went to Damascus and called dictator Bashr Al Assad an intelligent and charming man. The friend of many African dictators, peanut farmer Jimmy carter, went to Korea and declared "I find Kim Il Sung to be vigorous and intelligent". Castro came to Addis Abeba, talked to the killer who declared: "I hate hurting even a fly" and publicly declared "Mengistu is an honest revolutionary!" America's admired and "intelligent" allies ranged from El Salvador's General Maximiliano Hernandez (the very man of the occult who said "it is a great crime to kill a fly than a man because men are resurrected while flies die forever") to Ian Smith, apartheid Botha, Mobutu and Samuel Doe, Franco and Videla, Pinochet and Papadopoulos, Suharto and Nguema ( the latter who said "I am in permanent direct contact with God and the only man who can kill and will never go to hell" and then went ahead to slaughter thousands in Equatorial Guinea), So long as the dictators are theirs they are called intelligent. Washington, London, Berlin and the EU as a whole bankroll the dictator in Ethiopia. One western diplomat in Addis Abeba has gone on record admiring Meles Zenawi's capability to lie outright and in more than four directions. He is so intelligent he can rig elections, slaughter hundreds and stay in power! The man who makes a fine mess-- intelligent!
The admired native intelligence of Idi Amin (His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire [CBE] in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular and King Of Scotland”)
fast evaporated when he started to step on British and Western interests. He quickly became a monster, a fool, a cannibal, a savage, anything but intelligent. The "demonization" of all those who refuse to toe the line of the West is swift, cruel and relentless--just ask Gadafi, Mugabe, Sadam and others. The very people who praise Baathist and dictator par excellence Basher as intelligent would not be caught dead uttering one word of consideration as regards Sadam for example though he was a close ally of America at one time. Mengistu became crude and cruel because he was pro Soviet and not because he killed Ethiopians en masse which the new darling of Washington, a.k.a Meles, has also been doing more discreetly and in earnest. The political alliance and consideration dictates the qualification. In actual fact, where there is intelligence there is knowledge and this does not mean vulgar and pedestrian groping to get one's way by all means necessary, selling the country and the people wholesale if need be as Meles and others have done without qualms. It does not also mean power or authority but rather on how one obtains power and how he or she uses it. The West back then in the mid forties considered Mussolini civilized and mocked at Ethiopians trying to defend their country. The fascist was intelligent as was Hitler with whom many American companies such as General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Davis Oil co., Ford, ITT, Chase National Bank, etc did brisk business, forget Nazism please, be intelligent. "Henry Ford was a good friend of Hitler and his book The International Jew inspired Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Fuehrer kept Ford's picture in his office and Ford was one of the four foreigners to receive the German's highest civilian award", wrote one fact finder. Intelligent people all around--they pay the piper and even the song is theirs. The intelligent West also did business with and backed the intelligent regime of apartheid in South Africa.
Of course, we may be crying foul because we have failed to understand the very meaning of being intelligent. If being intelligent means being a tyrant, a cruel murderer. a corrupt embezzler, a liar, an election rigger, a Western puppet, a traitor to one's own people and nation, a complete idiot with the right buzz words and not so terrible English, then Meles and other tyrants and their thieving wives are indeed intelligent. If we take intelligence as cleverly disguised stupidity then intelligent people are ruling us and making our lives so miserable that we want to intelligently but definitively remove them from power and the face of the earth. In the end all this can be taken just as an important trivia.
Or (Forgive Me for Asking)
IS MELES ZENAWI INTELLIGENT?
This is really a joke, a pastime actually as dictator and intelligent are oxymoron. Sort of an idiot Savant, a fine mess, a little pregnant, accurate rumors. An Amhara Weyane and abundant poverty. Of late some quarters have insisted on calling the tyrant in Addis Abeba intelligent at a time when he is blatantly rigging an election while at the same time insisting on calling Robert Mugabe a blundering fool. When Idi Amin of Uganda was engineered by Britain and Israel to stage his coup against "Socialist" Milton Obote the British media was quick to mention and even praise his "native" intelligence. Native was the code word used for covering up "almost illiterate brute soldier of British colonialism". Toe the line and you will be called intelligent.
The whole charade stems from two sources or motivations: the fist one being that notorious racist prejudice which makes a coherent black person intelligent, "surprise, surprise the Kaffir boy knows how to talk at least!". Or as the surprised Italian fascist officer said in a famous Ethiopian poem: "I saw the blacks eating like human beings" sort of surprise. In my own experience I have met this monster many times, with my listeners being surprised that I could explain the situation in my country and Africa as a whole and even debate with them. Without being cruel I have to state it is like the monkey doing new tricks very well, the ape speaks English and he can hold his own in a debate, hallelujah! And thus every street smart smooth talker becomes an intelligent person, with qualifications of course. As Santiago Carrillo, the late leader of the Spanish CP said it, "to ask for Western type democracy in countries like Ethiopia and Vietnam is to bray at the moon". He was arguing that Ethiopians have to make do with a brutal colonel called Mengistu and his fake democracy as Carrillo, a pro Soviet to boot, was supporting the tyrant backed by Moscow. Thus, intelligent is by our own reduced standard, no one is comparing Meles with even any joke of a western miserable leader, mind you. The tyrants have used this prejudice to their own advantage as expected, they wear their Yes Bwana smile as a permanent fixture, they do the slave dance to perfection ( as Meles did sometime ago backing Sarkozy and Obama and betraying Africa in Copenhagen), repeat the buzz words that please the ears of the donors and, presto or voila, whichever you prefer, they or he appear as intelligent. When they say Meles is intelligent they do not mean he is crafty, devious, sneaky, able to hide his ignorance, intriguer, cruel, and a docile puppet, no. Meles said give me an opposition lest I become corrupt with absolute power and they clapped (intelligent was the cry). The dictator of Turkmenistan was one step ahead as he said: there are no opposition parties so how can I give them freedom? An intelligent chap!
The second reason for some calling these depots intelligent is because they are their puppets, instruments of neo colonial domination, and their mercenaries. Albert Camus called an intellectual an unsuccessful idiot and the late Walter Rodney defined the dictator as follows:
"A dictator is defined as one who elevates himself above all other citizens and often makes claims to be closer to God than mere mortals. Emperors, kings and nobles of the feudal period easily became dictators because they could justify despotic acts on the grounds that royal power and authority were of sacred origin. In more modern versions of dictatorship, the absolute ruler has to fabricate an elaborate cult of the personality to prove that he is more intelligent, more potent and generally superior to any other human being. Idi Amin fancied himself not only a physical giant but also as an intellectual giant. Besides, he boasted of a direct line to Allah. Eric Gairy, our Caribbean ex-dictator, dabbled in obeah and convinced himself that he was better than the world's leading scientists and would personally solve the problem of unidentified flying objects. This is the stuff of which dictators are made". Not intelligence at all unless one mistakes vulgar notions and instinct for intelligence.
Back in 2008 TV personality Barbara Walters went to Damascus and called dictator Bashr Al Assad an intelligent and charming man. The friend of many African dictators, peanut farmer Jimmy carter, went to Korea and declared "I find Kim Il Sung to be vigorous and intelligent". Castro came to Addis Abeba, talked to the killer who declared: "I hate hurting even a fly" and publicly declared "Mengistu is an honest revolutionary!" America's admired and "intelligent" allies ranged from El Salvador's General Maximiliano Hernandez (the very man of the occult who said "it is a great crime to kill a fly than a man because men are resurrected while flies die forever") to Ian Smith, apartheid Botha, Mobutu and Samuel Doe, Franco and Videla, Pinochet and Papadopoulos, Suharto and Nguema ( the latter who said "I am in permanent direct contact with God and the only man who can kill and will never go to hell" and then went ahead to slaughter thousands in Equatorial Guinea), So long as the dictators are theirs they are called intelligent. Washington, London, Berlin and the EU as a whole bankroll the dictator in Ethiopia. One western diplomat in Addis Abeba has gone on record admiring Meles Zenawi's capability to lie outright and in more than four directions. He is so intelligent he can rig elections, slaughter hundreds and stay in power! The man who makes a fine mess-- intelligent!
The admired native intelligence of Idi Amin (His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire [CBE] in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular and King Of Scotland”)
fast evaporated when he started to step on British and Western interests. He quickly became a monster, a fool, a cannibal, a savage, anything but intelligent. The "demonization" of all those who refuse to toe the line of the West is swift, cruel and relentless--just ask Gadafi, Mugabe, Sadam and others. The very people who praise Baathist and dictator par excellence Basher as intelligent would not be caught dead uttering one word of consideration as regards Sadam for example though he was a close ally of America at one time. Mengistu became crude and cruel because he was pro Soviet and not because he killed Ethiopians en masse which the new darling of Washington, a.k.a Meles, has also been doing more discreetly and in earnest. The political alliance and consideration dictates the qualification. In actual fact, where there is intelligence there is knowledge and this does not mean vulgar and pedestrian groping to get one's way by all means necessary, selling the country and the people wholesale if need be as Meles and others have done without qualms. It does not also mean power or authority but rather on how one obtains power and how he or she uses it. The West back then in the mid forties considered Mussolini civilized and mocked at Ethiopians trying to defend their country. The fascist was intelligent as was Hitler with whom many American companies such as General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Davis Oil co., Ford, ITT, Chase National Bank, etc did brisk business, forget Nazism please, be intelligent. "Henry Ford was a good friend of Hitler and his book The International Jew inspired Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Fuehrer kept Ford's picture in his office and Ford was one of the four foreigners to receive the German's highest civilian award", wrote one fact finder. Intelligent people all around--they pay the piper and even the song is theirs. The intelligent West also did business with and backed the intelligent regime of apartheid in South Africa.
Of course, we may be crying foul because we have failed to understand the very meaning of being intelligent. If being intelligent means being a tyrant, a cruel murderer. a corrupt embezzler, a liar, an election rigger, a Western puppet, a traitor to one's own people and nation, a complete idiot with the right buzz words and not so terrible English, then Meles and other tyrants and their thieving wives are indeed intelligent. If we take intelligence as cleverly disguised stupidity then intelligent people are ruling us and making our lives so miserable that we want to intelligently but definitively remove them from power and the face of the earth. In the end all this can be taken just as an important trivia.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Useful Delusioon
THE USEFUL DELUSION OF BEING INDEPENDENT
Without going deep into the not so negligible difference between an illusion (more of a perceptual problem) and a delusion (concerning belief despite facts to the contrary) it is safe to state that most of Africa suffers from the delusion of being independent fifty years after some 18 African countries allegedly gained their "independence" from Colonialism which was a tricky monster if there ever was one.
Colonialism came with the Bible in one hand and as the Africans bowed to pray the white man took the land and their alleged freedom (at least from being colonized by a foreign country). Colonialism played many tricks on gullible Africans and its most damaging joke was to declare that it has left (front door exit) while actually rushing back in through the back door (neo colonialism using the black bourgeoisie). The puppets wearing black masks, denounced so bitterly in another way, Black Skins White Masks, by Frantz Fanon for one, were quick to declare that formal independence (flags and a native government that played the puppet role to the hilt) was actually the real thing while the delusion was being promoted as actual. A national flag, a black oppressor in a Mercedes Benz and a Rolls Royce, palaces and corrupt and hedonistic existence for the few and Africans were expected to hail this as freedom and salvation. Those who said the Emperor was actually naked and that colonialism has continued in a new garb (with the old stink in place) were quickly silenced. Belgian and CIA agents collaborated to have Patrice Lumumba murdered. Freedom fighters Um Nyobe, Felix Moumie and later on Mondlane, Machel and Cabral were gotten rid off in one way or another. Pan Africanists with a strong anti imperialist stance were made victims of foreign engineered coups as in Ghana and Nkrumah. Colonialism never left but wore a new mask, Africa was doomed as the traitors had a field day selling the whole continent without any scruples or qualms.
The one party state that was the darling of the West fleecing Africa through a corrupt and malleable strongman (Mobutu is a good example) went against any notion of democratic governance. Rebellions were bound to erupt here and there and the colonizers had to spread again the virus of what Nyrere called "tribalism"and is nowadays referred to as "ethnicism", the "Ethnic assaulting the Nation" as Samir Amin put it in a book. Africa's desire to consolidate nation states broke against the iceberg of ethnic assault and the division helped carry the goal of the rapacious West to its zenith. (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were also to become victims of this sponsored ethnic or nationality assault). Worse still, even the ethnically or nationally cohesive people like the Somalis succumbed to the virus, divided on clan levels and are still going on with their carnage no matter what. Yet, we must admit that, fifty years on, the delusion of independence is no more a big problem--we all know few African countries are really independent. Actually, the two countries that had never been colonized, mainly Ethiopia and Liberia, are also fine examples of dependence and neo colonial servility. Liberia was handed over to freed American slaves and these imposed their corrupt rule over the "natives" with the help of America and North American companies like Firestone rubber company and when the jury of revenge came (via the Samuel Doe coup) it was indeed violent (Tolbert and many ministers were summarily shot). Liberia was not independent in the 19th century and is not so now either. Ethiopia was never colonized (maybe the Ethiopians read the Bible before the white man and were not duped to close their eyes and pray) but the regimes in power for more than seventy years were/are puppets of foreign powers (USA and the Soviet Union) and Ethiopians have never realized their dream of democratic governance. This is not to say that there was little difference between the colonised and the not colonized (perhaps there is some in the psyche and type of wounds) but it is to assert that colonialism did not leave, not ever, but stayed on with more fangs and new garbs. As I said, colonialism is a tricky monster.
Like it can even change colour and appearance given the fact that China is now busy replacing the old and known plunderers. As a Young Turk plunderer, China seems to have little or no scruples other than fiercely pursuing its own national interests but it has learnt the moves and gives lip service to the "delusion", the flag and the false belief in a non existent sovereignty. Buttering up our ego, telling us we are rich and proud when we are poor and miserable and they are taking away our wealth and backing our killers (Beshir, Meles, Mugabe, etc). In reality, the assault on our pride and self respect has been so strong that most of us have succumbed to self hate (a bonanza for the skin lightening product manufacturers for example) and lack of self confidence. We claim that partaking wisdom at the feet of the white man is all, we speak English or French and we are wise and we know it all (as opposed to the "ignorant" majority that doesn't), and our salvation can only come from the good will of the new colonizers. The pathetic souls who pray "Our Father who art in the White House" are good examples of this malady. The dependence and absolute lack of belief in the strength and power of one's people is very damaging especially in light of the real situation in which there seems little hope of achieving meaningful social change peacefully. And yet, it is sadly true that the armed rebels claiming to fight for our liberation have turned out to be murderous thugs ( Renamo, RUF, LRA and others), lumpen guerrillas if you want. Our misery is compounded; colonialism is dead but long live colonialism is not a dead cry.
It is of course possible to contend that we should be left alone with our delusions. It is probable that if one takes one's hell as a paradise then the suffering may appear less (illusion). Ethiopian say if we call it life dwelling in the graveyard may be comfortable or warm. The perspective matters. If the poor man does not drink butter in his dream he would have died sooner from constipation is another favourite saying in Ethiopia. Delusion plays a role. Instead of a white Bwana governor we have a black native oppressor--is there no difference? Isn't it better if we delude ourselves that there is a difference especially when we cannot find an iota even using a magnifying glass for investigation? Less expectation, less frustration. More delusion, less pain. The bastards have not left (blood diamonds, blood Coltan, a whole continent plundered without mercy) but why not delude ourselves that they have? Viewed from this angle, the delusion of independence makes our graveyard feel warm. We all know we live in a "cold" continent so why harp on it and shiver when we can embrace our delusion and sweat from the imagined heat?
Without going deep into the not so negligible difference between an illusion (more of a perceptual problem) and a delusion (concerning belief despite facts to the contrary) it is safe to state that most of Africa suffers from the delusion of being independent fifty years after some 18 African countries allegedly gained their "independence" from Colonialism which was a tricky monster if there ever was one.
Colonialism came with the Bible in one hand and as the Africans bowed to pray the white man took the land and their alleged freedom (at least from being colonized by a foreign country). Colonialism played many tricks on gullible Africans and its most damaging joke was to declare that it has left (front door exit) while actually rushing back in through the back door (neo colonialism using the black bourgeoisie). The puppets wearing black masks, denounced so bitterly in another way, Black Skins White Masks, by Frantz Fanon for one, were quick to declare that formal independence (flags and a native government that played the puppet role to the hilt) was actually the real thing while the delusion was being promoted as actual. A national flag, a black oppressor in a Mercedes Benz and a Rolls Royce, palaces and corrupt and hedonistic existence for the few and Africans were expected to hail this as freedom and salvation. Those who said the Emperor was actually naked and that colonialism has continued in a new garb (with the old stink in place) were quickly silenced. Belgian and CIA agents collaborated to have Patrice Lumumba murdered. Freedom fighters Um Nyobe, Felix Moumie and later on Mondlane, Machel and Cabral were gotten rid off in one way or another. Pan Africanists with a strong anti imperialist stance were made victims of foreign engineered coups as in Ghana and Nkrumah. Colonialism never left but wore a new mask, Africa was doomed as the traitors had a field day selling the whole continent without any scruples or qualms.
The one party state that was the darling of the West fleecing Africa through a corrupt and malleable strongman (Mobutu is a good example) went against any notion of democratic governance. Rebellions were bound to erupt here and there and the colonizers had to spread again the virus of what Nyrere called "tribalism"and is nowadays referred to as "ethnicism", the "Ethnic assaulting the Nation" as Samir Amin put it in a book. Africa's desire to consolidate nation states broke against the iceberg of ethnic assault and the division helped carry the goal of the rapacious West to its zenith. (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were also to become victims of this sponsored ethnic or nationality assault). Worse still, even the ethnically or nationally cohesive people like the Somalis succumbed to the virus, divided on clan levels and are still going on with their carnage no matter what. Yet, we must admit that, fifty years on, the delusion of independence is no more a big problem--we all know few African countries are really independent. Actually, the two countries that had never been colonized, mainly Ethiopia and Liberia, are also fine examples of dependence and neo colonial servility. Liberia was handed over to freed American slaves and these imposed their corrupt rule over the "natives" with the help of America and North American companies like Firestone rubber company and when the jury of revenge came (via the Samuel Doe coup) it was indeed violent (Tolbert and many ministers were summarily shot). Liberia was not independent in the 19th century and is not so now either. Ethiopia was never colonized (maybe the Ethiopians read the Bible before the white man and were not duped to close their eyes and pray) but the regimes in power for more than seventy years were/are puppets of foreign powers (USA and the Soviet Union) and Ethiopians have never realized their dream of democratic governance. This is not to say that there was little difference between the colonised and the not colonized (perhaps there is some in the psyche and type of wounds) but it is to assert that colonialism did not leave, not ever, but stayed on with more fangs and new garbs. As I said, colonialism is a tricky monster.
Like it can even change colour and appearance given the fact that China is now busy replacing the old and known plunderers. As a Young Turk plunderer, China seems to have little or no scruples other than fiercely pursuing its own national interests but it has learnt the moves and gives lip service to the "delusion", the flag and the false belief in a non existent sovereignty. Buttering up our ego, telling us we are rich and proud when we are poor and miserable and they are taking away our wealth and backing our killers (Beshir, Meles, Mugabe, etc). In reality, the assault on our pride and self respect has been so strong that most of us have succumbed to self hate (a bonanza for the skin lightening product manufacturers for example) and lack of self confidence. We claim that partaking wisdom at the feet of the white man is all, we speak English or French and we are wise and we know it all (as opposed to the "ignorant" majority that doesn't), and our salvation can only come from the good will of the new colonizers. The pathetic souls who pray "Our Father who art in the White House" are good examples of this malady. The dependence and absolute lack of belief in the strength and power of one's people is very damaging especially in light of the real situation in which there seems little hope of achieving meaningful social change peacefully. And yet, it is sadly true that the armed rebels claiming to fight for our liberation have turned out to be murderous thugs ( Renamo, RUF, LRA and others), lumpen guerrillas if you want. Our misery is compounded; colonialism is dead but long live colonialism is not a dead cry.
It is of course possible to contend that we should be left alone with our delusions. It is probable that if one takes one's hell as a paradise then the suffering may appear less (illusion). Ethiopian say if we call it life dwelling in the graveyard may be comfortable or warm. The perspective matters. If the poor man does not drink butter in his dream he would have died sooner from constipation is another favourite saying in Ethiopia. Delusion plays a role. Instead of a white Bwana governor we have a black native oppressor--is there no difference? Isn't it better if we delude ourselves that there is a difference especially when we cannot find an iota even using a magnifying glass for investigation? Less expectation, less frustration. More delusion, less pain. The bastards have not left (blood diamonds, blood Coltan, a whole continent plundered without mercy) but why not delude ourselves that they have? Viewed from this angle, the delusion of independence makes our graveyard feel warm. We all know we live in a "cold" continent so why harp on it and shiver when we can embrace our delusion and sweat from the imagined heat?
The Return of the Coup
THE RETURN OF THE COUP
Those who had been claiming that Africans enjoy sequels and the comfort of the misery they are used to have now been vindicated. The return of the coup d'etat highlights and confirms this for all to see. Expectedly, there would be those cynics who would ask "why not the coup?" indeed when civilian power holders are corrupt and their sanity really in question.
Take the case of Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, another of the African leaders who want to pass power to their sons. For long, old man Wade acted almost as if the Cabinda mess was not in his house and paraded as an international peace maker ("let me help in Kashmir please" but there were no takers, alas).The delusion or confusion went on to mess up the situation in Senegal (so much so that some claim the country will soon have its own Islamist hardliners problem) and has led to the ridiculous project of spending more than US$ 30 million to erect an African Renaissance monument. Unmitigated waste and the monument has already been called ugly by none other than the world famous Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow. Isn't Wade really asking, nay begging, for a coup? Travel to the east of our continent and the Ethiopian dictator, who has sold 3 million hectares of fertile land to the Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Saudi Arabians, etc has also spent millions on a monument (one of many) for the victims of the Red Terror of the previous regime while almost all Ethiopians know that the present dictator is also hunting down the same people (the EPRP) who were victims of the Terror. The Swaziland King is also begging for a coup as are Deby of Chad, Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Beshir of the Sudan and the sick and incapacitated Nigerian president. No wonder the coup has come back with a vengeance removing fossil in Guinea, Mauritania, Guniea Bissau and Mali and threatening to do the same elsewhere too.
Actually, many of the present African leaders going through the funny motion of refusing to accept within the AU any coup maker are themselves notorious coup makers. Campaore, Sassou, Nguema, Beshir, Gaddafi and more made their own coup in their own time. Others usurped power, few are freely elected and almost all are corrupt dictators. The AU atmosphere reeks of coups and the military, the Armani suits notwithstanding. The African situation continues to make the coup an enticing alternative. If ignorant military officers like Idi Amin and Bokassa and Samuel Doe can take over power who can blame other sergeants if they say why not me or us indeed? It is our turn to eat sort of claim as they say in Kenya. The lowest level had been reached; there is nowhere to go but high up even with a slightly educated sergeant. Who can also forget that the coup was a gift given to Africa by the former colonial powers and new would be masters like America? Independence in the sixties led to unfurling a flag and going through the motions od being free while colonial or neo colonial puppets came to power to rob the countries blind. The deception was great, the disappointment unbearable. An yet there were sparks, harbingers of hope or at least those promising change and national pride and self governance but these were extinguished fast and furious by the West. Patrice Lumumba was murdered and Mobutu helped to stage his coup eventually and to assume absolute power. Nkrumah was ousted by a coup. Sekou Toure survived by the skin of his teeth by turning into a despot and wiping out ruthlessly any aspiring or potential coup maker. We Africans are nothing but good students of Bwana pale face and thus the coup was born, assisted by the West or freelanced by our own.
And no coup was dull, we must admit. They had flamboyant names with promises of all or nothing--Redemption, Salvation, Correctional, Revolutionary, Resurgence and Nationalist and what have you. They were of course anything but. We liked the fact that they ended many falsehoods called Constitution, parliament, democracy and even the One Nation claim. Tribalism or "ethnicism", as it is said today, came out of the hole, became halal/kosher, the politics to uphold. The coups came to put an end to the one party system of the civilians ands set up the one man military rule, with or without a party. And as time went by, the coup became refined, it even happened accidentally once, it came again and again in Dahomey (now Benin), baptized itself as a movement and not a coup and soon after it happened started to go through the motions of an election (thoroughly rigged) and the coup maker dumps his uniform for Armani suits and his military title for the less intimidating His Excellency. Yet again, some naive souls who took their own dreams for the reality, that is to say like Sankara in Burkina Faso, were physically removed by a sober and correctional coup that brought the situation back to its rails, no more talk of being free and self reliant. Still, the coup may try hard to be a non coup but we can still see that its main features linger on. In Guinea Bissau we now have the latest version: the confused coup. Coups and violence against the people and any notion of the rule of law have been synonymous and the tradition is being kept as we saw in Guinea (Conakry). And only the naive amongst us still imagine that Britain, France and Washington are in no way involved in the coups and counter coups and conflicts bedevilling our hapless continent.
Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia, who killed himself rather than surrender to a British invading force, told the British to send their invading troops outright and not to waste time by sending missionaries and spies. No meandering and procrastination. We tend to welcome the return of the coup because it is ending the fiction of democracy and good governance, of free elections and popular participation. The real thing in Africa, all these talks of elections notwithstanding, is the lack of democratic governance and the predominance of neo-colonial powers. We hail the return of the coup because it highlights the reality we live in, the massacre in the Conakry stadium, the murder of political dissidents, the campaign against the free press, the arrogant and murderous swagger of almost illiterate officers and generals, the blind violence against defenceless people and the real face of the African State. The truth shall set us free, no? We want and we shall get more coups. Amen.
Those who had been claiming that Africans enjoy sequels and the comfort of the misery they are used to have now been vindicated. The return of the coup d'etat highlights and confirms this for all to see. Expectedly, there would be those cynics who would ask "why not the coup?" indeed when civilian power holders are corrupt and their sanity really in question.
Take the case of Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, another of the African leaders who want to pass power to their sons. For long, old man Wade acted almost as if the Cabinda mess was not in his house and paraded as an international peace maker ("let me help in Kashmir please" but there were no takers, alas).The delusion or confusion went on to mess up the situation in Senegal (so much so that some claim the country will soon have its own Islamist hardliners problem) and has led to the ridiculous project of spending more than US$ 30 million to erect an African Renaissance monument. Unmitigated waste and the monument has already been called ugly by none other than the world famous Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow. Isn't Wade really asking, nay begging, for a coup? Travel to the east of our continent and the Ethiopian dictator, who has sold 3 million hectares of fertile land to the Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Saudi Arabians, etc has also spent millions on a monument (one of many) for the victims of the Red Terror of the previous regime while almost all Ethiopians know that the present dictator is also hunting down the same people (the EPRP) who were victims of the Terror. The Swaziland King is also begging for a coup as are Deby of Chad, Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Beshir of the Sudan and the sick and incapacitated Nigerian president. No wonder the coup has come back with a vengeance removing fossil in Guinea, Mauritania, Guniea Bissau and Mali and threatening to do the same elsewhere too.
Actually, many of the present African leaders going through the funny motion of refusing to accept within the AU any coup maker are themselves notorious coup makers. Campaore, Sassou, Nguema, Beshir, Gaddafi and more made their own coup in their own time. Others usurped power, few are freely elected and almost all are corrupt dictators. The AU atmosphere reeks of coups and the military, the Armani suits notwithstanding. The African situation continues to make the coup an enticing alternative. If ignorant military officers like Idi Amin and Bokassa and Samuel Doe can take over power who can blame other sergeants if they say why not me or us indeed? It is our turn to eat sort of claim as they say in Kenya. The lowest level had been reached; there is nowhere to go but high up even with a slightly educated sergeant. Who can also forget that the coup was a gift given to Africa by the former colonial powers and new would be masters like America? Independence in the sixties led to unfurling a flag and going through the motions od being free while colonial or neo colonial puppets came to power to rob the countries blind. The deception was great, the disappointment unbearable. An yet there were sparks, harbingers of hope or at least those promising change and national pride and self governance but these were extinguished fast and furious by the West. Patrice Lumumba was murdered and Mobutu helped to stage his coup eventually and to assume absolute power. Nkrumah was ousted by a coup. Sekou Toure survived by the skin of his teeth by turning into a despot and wiping out ruthlessly any aspiring or potential coup maker. We Africans are nothing but good students of Bwana pale face and thus the coup was born, assisted by the West or freelanced by our own.
And no coup was dull, we must admit. They had flamboyant names with promises of all or nothing--Redemption, Salvation, Correctional, Revolutionary, Resurgence and Nationalist and what have you. They were of course anything but. We liked the fact that they ended many falsehoods called Constitution, parliament, democracy and even the One Nation claim. Tribalism or "ethnicism", as it is said today, came out of the hole, became halal/kosher, the politics to uphold. The coups came to put an end to the one party system of the civilians ands set up the one man military rule, with or without a party. And as time went by, the coup became refined, it even happened accidentally once, it came again and again in Dahomey (now Benin), baptized itself as a movement and not a coup and soon after it happened started to go through the motions of an election (thoroughly rigged) and the coup maker dumps his uniform for Armani suits and his military title for the less intimidating His Excellency. Yet again, some naive souls who took their own dreams for the reality, that is to say like Sankara in Burkina Faso, were physically removed by a sober and correctional coup that brought the situation back to its rails, no more talk of being free and self reliant. Still, the coup may try hard to be a non coup but we can still see that its main features linger on. In Guinea Bissau we now have the latest version: the confused coup. Coups and violence against the people and any notion of the rule of law have been synonymous and the tradition is being kept as we saw in Guinea (Conakry). And only the naive amongst us still imagine that Britain, France and Washington are in no way involved in the coups and counter coups and conflicts bedevilling our hapless continent.
Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia, who killed himself rather than surrender to a British invading force, told the British to send their invading troops outright and not to waste time by sending missionaries and spies. No meandering and procrastination. We tend to welcome the return of the coup because it is ending the fiction of democracy and good governance, of free elections and popular participation. The real thing in Africa, all these talks of elections notwithstanding, is the lack of democratic governance and the predominance of neo-colonial powers. We hail the return of the coup because it highlights the reality we live in, the massacre in the Conakry stadium, the murder of political dissidents, the campaign against the free press, the arrogant and murderous swagger of almost illiterate officers and generals, the blind violence against defenceless people and the real face of the African State. The truth shall set us free, no? We want and we shall get more coups. Amen.
Hama Tuma's Case of Socialist Witchdocotor reprinted
For long out of print, Hama Tuma’s book:THE CASE OF THE SOCIALIST WITCH DOCTOR AND OTHER STORIES has now been reprinted and is available for the public. To order your copy e mail to Menberu.lemma2@gmail.com. Price: US$ 12 plus US$ 3 for mailing cost paypal address: menberu.lemma2@gmail.com
Review of Hama Tuma's poems
»Of Memories and Dreams in Hama Tuma’s”Of Spade and Ethiopians ‘
By arefe
By Kumlachew Fantahun
‘The struggle of the writer is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness.’
Milan Kundera
Many critics are of the opinion that Ethiopian literature in English is a closed book. Apart from a few novels, poems and plays, one can find scattered here and there; writing in English is not the norm in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia boasts of an ancient writing tradition and unique alphabet in Africa and accordingly it has a rich Geez and Amharic writing heritage. But when it comes to English, it lags very far behind other African countries.For example, our neighbor, Kenya far surpasses Ethiopia in the amount of literary production in English. The reason of course, is not far to seek. Debebe Seifu in his master’s thesis ‘Ethiopian Literature in English’ has the following to say about the dearth of writing in English. ’Looked at from the point of view of the hoary Geez and Amharic literature creative writing in English is a baby tradition in Ethiopia…. It has brief history of only two decades. When we look at the amount of English writings produced in some other African countries, the output in Ethiopia strikes us scanty intermittent and not very encouraging.’
The reason for this paucity of creative writing in English are the following, according to Debebe
1.Ethiopian writers have a strong background in Amharic that disallows them to resort to or at least give an undivided attention to writing in English … And, English has never been the first official language in Ethiopia.
2.English has not been given emphasis in Ethiopian schools; hence, lack of adequate mastery or command of the language inevitably barred those who might otherwise have as pined to write in English
In I In particular, English poetry is a rare phenomenon in Ethiopian. There are notnotnot many writers trying their hands at poetry.
ha Debebe’s theses treat only two poets writing in English, Tsegaye
Ge GebreMedhin and Eyasu Gorfu.
E Nowadays, the situation appears to be improving with many writers
incr increasingly trying thier hands at poetry English.Hama Tuma ‘s poetry pc collection, ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians,’ (Free Ethiopian Press, 1991) is a cas a case in point.
The predominant theme in Hama Tuma’s ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians’ is that of cultural memory and an attempt to make archeology of wrongs and cruelties of the Red Terror, and infamous phenomenon that followed in the wake of the misdirected-1974 Revolution. It seems that those who survived through those dreadful days are nowadays looking back and putting the memory of this Ethiopian Holocaust to writing, there by redeeming the lost, if only in imagination. They reminiscence on the horror and heinous acts of the ‘inhumanity of man against man’ wrought by the then rulers. Fictional and non-fictional works that are coming out bear testimony to this tendency of invoking the past and reminiscence on it.
Himself a significant actor in the EPRP and with first hand experience, Hama Tuma often dwells both in his fiction and poetry on the horrendous acts perpetrated by the architects of Red Terror. We read of such appalling cruelties as cutting the penis of a man and make his mother eat it, women’s genitals ripped open by hot iron, bottle of wine filled with sand hanging by thread on a person’s penis. In particular, his poems, ‘Of Spades and Ethiopians’, “To Bury a Brother’, ‘No Wine Bottles please!’ ‘Voice of the Dead’, ‘The Grader and Dreams. ‘Responsibility’, ‘Breaking the Monoculture Economy’, ‘Some Threads from History’ deal with those evil days and the attendant atrocities.
In ‘Of spades and Ethiopians’ the poet not content to write about the events says
What I need is not a pen, but
A shovel with which to dig the dirt
And throw it down the garbage can of non-history’s oblivion.
A country of ‘an ignorant mass, backward and more’, though blessed with ‘a modern king far sighted to the core’ was still wallowing in misery and poverty until the monarch’ successor took the throne and assert “it pulled Ethiopia out of the middle ages in just a handful of years.” by introducing land to the tiller, Soviet style democracy and mass-organizations. Since the country is lucky enough to have the privilege of being governed by this ”cool, intelligent, wise and determined leader’ in order for his noble objectives to be achieved and for the country to remain safe, nobody should be-allowed to tamper with the progress of the revolution. The mighty wave has to go untrammeled, sweeping everything that stands in its way to reach its destination.
All revolutions devour their sons
be they French or Russian
Why do you want an exception in the Ethiopian one?
Reminiscent of the communist saying, ‘revolution is not a dinner party’, the next stanza gently reminds us of the sorry but ineluctable choice the revolution was faced with;
So don’t exaggerate the Terror bit
For the enemy must be hit
Too bad if a generation dies
Revolution means trying times
As is the case with his brilliantly ironic stories, his poems also are full of wry humor and subtle irony. The laughable silliness as well as the slavish servility of the revolutionary leaders are portrayed very vividly and also mocked.
If Brezhnev hums a tune,
Mengistu will sing it loud
The stupidity that results from total allegiance to an alien creed is brought out in the following sarcastic poem;
I have been to Russia and even Georgia
But the worst Russian I’ve ever met lives some where in north Ethiopia
He thinks Stalin’s death is an imperialist plot directed against Ethiopia.
Some of the atrocities of the red terror were so horrible that any question as to appropriateness and rationality of the actions could be silenced with a resort,’ it also happened in Russia.’
Human life was rendered so cheap amid easily expendable that towns were turned into killing fields where minions off the powers that be could shoot people at will and with impurity, so eyewitnesses tell us. The Red Terror people were busy killing and with so many people to shoot they eventually run short of bullets, which therefore had to be retrieved from the corpses and be paid for by any one who came to claim the bodies of the dead. The following lines depict this gruesome picture; the lesson ostensibly being in a worthy revolution nothing comes gratis.
The soldier outside
counted the bullet holes
in my brother’s corpses.
I paid the price
got the receipt
and took my brother away.
Away from the pile
forgotten already
I still had a burial to pay.
Here we are faced with the irony of paying for having for brother killed for the sake of revolution, which promised better days.In ‘No wine bottles, please’, the poet relates the gory spectacle he witnessed in the third police station. A wine of bottle filled with water is hung with a nylon thread on a penis of ‘anarchist recalcitrant’. In case some find this too horrible to contemplate, the poet adds some mitigating remarks, which implies that this manner of torture pales in comparison with other crueler ones;
A torture to make you holler
But some say it is bland
And not so bad
Compared to other threatens they have had.
In ‘The voice of the Dead’, the personae of the poem confronts its implied readers with penetrating and piercing questions to which, one has to give satisfactory answer or be tortured with guilt feeling. It seems that the one to whom the question is posed won’t able to escape unless he can account for what course of action that he took in relation to the massacre.
Where were you?
When you brother screamed for help
When young girls got raped
And mothers went mad seeing their children butchered
Right in front of them.
In another similar poem, those who felt it unwise to be engaged and dirty themselves with realities of the day are castigated and brought to task. The crude and absolutely deeds were such that, the poet seems to say; it would be a crime to simply stand and watch, unengaged and non-committal.
When the knife entered
your brother’s heart,
You simply watched
worse still,you walked away
without a protest or a shout.
The tragedy of the Red Terror was not only physical. It killed bodies yes. But it did much more than that. It killed and buried a nation’s beautiful dreams and hopes. The student movement which helped to overthrow the centuries old feudal system gave rise to hopes of better future and emancipation. But no sooner was the monarch ousted than a new and more sinister leader took his place, there by dashing the hopeful expectations of the people by snuffing out the lives of the educated youth who with enthusiasm and verve were trying to inaugurate democracy to the nation.
The short poem, ‘The Grader and the Dream’ deals with this poignant loss,
The ditches are filled
The burial complete
no speeches are made
no epitaphs planned
no building rises up
It’s only dreams
of a fair tomorrow
only the nation’s hope that is getting buried .
However, though the revolution is chiefly to blame for the dashing of hopes and dreams of the nation, the poet points out that we Ethiopian as a people are not much given to dreaming and imagination. He seams to attribute this paucity of imagination and incapacity for being visionary to moral cowardice and pursuit of ephemeral pleasures.
In “An empty cry” he deplores what he takes to be his fellow countrymen’s myopic vision and inability to transcend inconsequential hedonistic pursuits, He asks rhetorically.
Are we born so wretched
that our dreams
got only as far as a woman’s thighs.
as to clap for the boots
which crushes the flowers to dust.
The poet seems to imply that our fear of change is such that it would amount to visionary quixotism to dream of an Ethiopia free of war and famine. Of course, when a people are so accustomed to a succession of misfortunes, it would take courage of utopian scale to ever imagine a radically different future. This appears to be the idea contained the following lines, suggesting incredulity at the thought of an Ethiopia bereft of strife.
Who knows what will happen
If Ethiopia finds peace.
Will the world turn upside down?
Or will is stay the same
The point, of course is not lost on the reader. A peaceful Ethiopia is almost impossible to imagine. Their phonetically similarity nonetheless, Ethiopia and utopia are poles apart. Hama Tuma says facetiously to dream of utopia in Ethiopia is crime, a treachery because it would threaten its pact with its plight. In a supremacy ironic poem, ‘I love my nightmare’, the poet echoes the observation many writers have made about the Ethiopian (and African) fear of change.
Last night I had such a dream
an utopian unEthiopian dream
I thought I saw famine gone
He goes on to relate a bright scenario he envisioned, people smiling “with their hearts and eyes; a noise of festive drums, well-fed peasants, mothers going to church to praise not to pray. But somewhere along the poem, the poet tells us that he wakes up from his dreams in-fear for having such ‘a terrible dream’ because he saw the future and it was not… bleak’
I woke up in fright
scared the kebeles might jail me
as a dissident not content
with his nightmare present
and dreaming like those in forest.
As the above sketch attempted to show, memory and dream are the salient features of Hama Tuma ‘s poem.
By arefe
By Kumlachew Fantahun
‘The struggle of the writer is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness.’
Milan Kundera
Many critics are of the opinion that Ethiopian literature in English is a closed book. Apart from a few novels, poems and plays, one can find scattered here and there; writing in English is not the norm in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia boasts of an ancient writing tradition and unique alphabet in Africa and accordingly it has a rich Geez and Amharic writing heritage. But when it comes to English, it lags very far behind other African countries.For example, our neighbor, Kenya far surpasses Ethiopia in the amount of literary production in English. The reason of course, is not far to seek. Debebe Seifu in his master’s thesis ‘Ethiopian Literature in English’ has the following to say about the dearth of writing in English. ’Looked at from the point of view of the hoary Geez and Amharic literature creative writing in English is a baby tradition in Ethiopia…. It has brief history of only two decades. When we look at the amount of English writings produced in some other African countries, the output in Ethiopia strikes us scanty intermittent and not very encouraging.’
The reason for this paucity of creative writing in English are the following, according to Debebe
1.Ethiopian writers have a strong background in Amharic that disallows them to resort to or at least give an undivided attention to writing in English … And, English has never been the first official language in Ethiopia.
2.English has not been given emphasis in Ethiopian schools; hence, lack of adequate mastery or command of the language inevitably barred those who might otherwise have as pined to write in English
In I In particular, English poetry is a rare phenomenon in Ethiopian. There are notnotnot many writers trying their hands at poetry.
ha Debebe’s theses treat only two poets writing in English, Tsegaye
Ge GebreMedhin and Eyasu Gorfu.
E Nowadays, the situation appears to be improving with many writers
incr increasingly trying thier hands at poetry English.Hama Tuma ‘s poetry pc collection, ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians,’ (Free Ethiopian Press, 1991) is a cas a case in point.
The predominant theme in Hama Tuma’s ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians’ is that of cultural memory and an attempt to make archeology of wrongs and cruelties of the Red Terror, and infamous phenomenon that followed in the wake of the misdirected-1974 Revolution. It seems that those who survived through those dreadful days are nowadays looking back and putting the memory of this Ethiopian Holocaust to writing, there by redeeming the lost, if only in imagination. They reminiscence on the horror and heinous acts of the ‘inhumanity of man against man’ wrought by the then rulers. Fictional and non-fictional works that are coming out bear testimony to this tendency of invoking the past and reminiscence on it.
Himself a significant actor in the EPRP and with first hand experience, Hama Tuma often dwells both in his fiction and poetry on the horrendous acts perpetrated by the architects of Red Terror. We read of such appalling cruelties as cutting the penis of a man and make his mother eat it, women’s genitals ripped open by hot iron, bottle of wine filled with sand hanging by thread on a person’s penis. In particular, his poems, ‘Of Spades and Ethiopians’, “To Bury a Brother’, ‘No Wine Bottles please!’ ‘Voice of the Dead’, ‘The Grader and Dreams. ‘Responsibility’, ‘Breaking the Monoculture Economy’, ‘Some Threads from History’ deal with those evil days and the attendant atrocities.
In ‘Of spades and Ethiopians’ the poet not content to write about the events says
What I need is not a pen, but
A shovel with which to dig the dirt
And throw it down the garbage can of non-history’s oblivion.
A country of ‘an ignorant mass, backward and more’, though blessed with ‘a modern king far sighted to the core’ was still wallowing in misery and poverty until the monarch’ successor took the throne and assert “it pulled Ethiopia out of the middle ages in just a handful of years.” by introducing land to the tiller, Soviet style democracy and mass-organizations. Since the country is lucky enough to have the privilege of being governed by this ”cool, intelligent, wise and determined leader’ in order for his noble objectives to be achieved and for the country to remain safe, nobody should be-allowed to tamper with the progress of the revolution. The mighty wave has to go untrammeled, sweeping everything that stands in its way to reach its destination.
All revolutions devour their sons
be they French or Russian
Why do you want an exception in the Ethiopian one?
Reminiscent of the communist saying, ‘revolution is not a dinner party’, the next stanza gently reminds us of the sorry but ineluctable choice the revolution was faced with;
So don’t exaggerate the Terror bit
For the enemy must be hit
Too bad if a generation dies
Revolution means trying times
As is the case with his brilliantly ironic stories, his poems also are full of wry humor and subtle irony. The laughable silliness as well as the slavish servility of the revolutionary leaders are portrayed very vividly and also mocked.
If Brezhnev hums a tune,
Mengistu will sing it loud
The stupidity that results from total allegiance to an alien creed is brought out in the following sarcastic poem;
I have been to Russia and even Georgia
But the worst Russian I’ve ever met lives some where in north Ethiopia
He thinks Stalin’s death is an imperialist plot directed against Ethiopia.
Some of the atrocities of the red terror were so horrible that any question as to appropriateness and rationality of the actions could be silenced with a resort,’ it also happened in Russia.’
Human life was rendered so cheap amid easily expendable that towns were turned into killing fields where minions off the powers that be could shoot people at will and with impurity, so eyewitnesses tell us. The Red Terror people were busy killing and with so many people to shoot they eventually run short of bullets, which therefore had to be retrieved from the corpses and be paid for by any one who came to claim the bodies of the dead. The following lines depict this gruesome picture; the lesson ostensibly being in a worthy revolution nothing comes gratis.
The soldier outside
counted the bullet holes
in my brother’s corpses.
I paid the price
got the receipt
and took my brother away.
Away from the pile
forgotten already
I still had a burial to pay.
Here we are faced with the irony of paying for having for brother killed for the sake of revolution, which promised better days.In ‘No wine bottles, please’, the poet relates the gory spectacle he witnessed in the third police station. A wine of bottle filled with water is hung with a nylon thread on a penis of ‘anarchist recalcitrant’. In case some find this too horrible to contemplate, the poet adds some mitigating remarks, which implies that this manner of torture pales in comparison with other crueler ones;
A torture to make you holler
But some say it is bland
And not so bad
Compared to other threatens they have had.
In ‘The voice of the Dead’, the personae of the poem confronts its implied readers with penetrating and piercing questions to which, one has to give satisfactory answer or be tortured with guilt feeling. It seems that the one to whom the question is posed won’t able to escape unless he can account for what course of action that he took in relation to the massacre.
Where were you?
When you brother screamed for help
When young girls got raped
And mothers went mad seeing their children butchered
Right in front of them.
In another similar poem, those who felt it unwise to be engaged and dirty themselves with realities of the day are castigated and brought to task. The crude and absolutely deeds were such that, the poet seems to say; it would be a crime to simply stand and watch, unengaged and non-committal.
When the knife entered
your brother’s heart,
You simply watched
worse still,you walked away
without a protest or a shout.
The tragedy of the Red Terror was not only physical. It killed bodies yes. But it did much more than that. It killed and buried a nation’s beautiful dreams and hopes. The student movement which helped to overthrow the centuries old feudal system gave rise to hopes of better future and emancipation. But no sooner was the monarch ousted than a new and more sinister leader took his place, there by dashing the hopeful expectations of the people by snuffing out the lives of the educated youth who with enthusiasm and verve were trying to inaugurate democracy to the nation.
The short poem, ‘The Grader and the Dream’ deals with this poignant loss,
The ditches are filled
The burial complete
no speeches are made
no epitaphs planned
no building rises up
It’s only dreams
of a fair tomorrow
only the nation’s hope that is getting buried .
However, though the revolution is chiefly to blame for the dashing of hopes and dreams of the nation, the poet points out that we Ethiopian as a people are not much given to dreaming and imagination. He seams to attribute this paucity of imagination and incapacity for being visionary to moral cowardice and pursuit of ephemeral pleasures.
In “An empty cry” he deplores what he takes to be his fellow countrymen’s myopic vision and inability to transcend inconsequential hedonistic pursuits, He asks rhetorically.
Are we born so wretched
that our dreams
got only as far as a woman’s thighs.
as to clap for the boots
which crushes the flowers to dust.
The poet seems to imply that our fear of change is such that it would amount to visionary quixotism to dream of an Ethiopia free of war and famine. Of course, when a people are so accustomed to a succession of misfortunes, it would take courage of utopian scale to ever imagine a radically different future. This appears to be the idea contained the following lines, suggesting incredulity at the thought of an Ethiopia bereft of strife.
Who knows what will happen
If Ethiopia finds peace.
Will the world turn upside down?
Or will is stay the same
The point, of course is not lost on the reader. A peaceful Ethiopia is almost impossible to imagine. Their phonetically similarity nonetheless, Ethiopia and utopia are poles apart. Hama Tuma says facetiously to dream of utopia in Ethiopia is crime, a treachery because it would threaten its pact with its plight. In a supremacy ironic poem, ‘I love my nightmare’, the poet echoes the observation many writers have made about the Ethiopian (and African) fear of change.
Last night I had such a dream
an utopian unEthiopian dream
I thought I saw famine gone
He goes on to relate a bright scenario he envisioned, people smiling “with their hearts and eyes; a noise of festive drums, well-fed peasants, mothers going to church to praise not to pray. But somewhere along the poem, the poet tells us that he wakes up from his dreams in-fear for having such ‘a terrible dream’ because he saw the future and it was not… bleak’
I woke up in fright
scared the kebeles might jail me
as a dissident not content
with his nightmare present
and dreaming like those in forest.
As the above sketch attempted to show, memory and dream are the salient features of Hama Tuma ‘s poem.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH FILM MAKER HAILE GERIMA
OF DEMONS, CHARLATANS AND RREVISIONISTS
WHAT IS WRONG WITH CINEASTE HAILE GERIMA?
By KASSAHUN
First of all, let me get rid off the notion that the artist/the intellectual in a given society is/can be apolitical, uninvolved, non partisan. To quote an authority (as this seems to please certain quarters) let me cite the late and very committed intellectual, Edward Said, who wrote: (in Representation of the Intellectual, page 110)
"Every intellectual whose métier is articulating and representing specific views, ideas, ideologies, logically aspires to making them work in a society. The intellectual who claims to write only for him or herself, or for the sake of pure learning, or abstract science is not to be, and must not be, believed. As the great Twentieth century writer Jean Genet once said, the moment you publish essays (or make and distribute films--K) in a society you have entered political life; so if you want not to be political do not write essays or speak out" (or make films--K).
Famous Ethiopian film maker, Haile Gerima, often claims to be "beyond or outside" of politics. He is royally mistaken if he is talking honestly. For, the film maker dabbles in politics big time though he does so in a bad or wrong way. A renowned film maker, his most famous film (Samoa) deals with the slave trade and racism and in many interviews he has made it clear the issue of racism affects him deeply. So be it. His latest film, Teza (which has won some international awards) deals with Ethiopia and again with the question of racism, displacement and alienation. Haile Gerima says he knows little or nothing about the Red Terror but both in Teza and previously in another film chronicling his return to Ethiopia after the fall of the Derg regime he had to deal with it in his own way, with prejudice and a practical disservice to the martyrs and those still bearing the scars.
And here is where some of us have been forced to come in, to raise our voices in defense of our own history, to safeguard the memory of the martyrs, to honor our brave and steadfast comrades who sacrificed their dear lives or endured atrocities for the sake of their country and people. And in the process to commit lese majesty as some of these elements consider it a crime to utter even a mild word of criticism against them (of course having been out in the rain so often I am not that scared of such admonitions). It must be admitted that there is presently a fierce revisionist campaign being waged by a variety of forces to denigrate that generation that struggled against the imperial and the totalitarian military regimes for the sake of democratic change. The campaign is on but the commanders have different motives--some are covering up their criminal roles, others shamed by their cowardice and betrayal in those trying times and dishonorably attacking those who dared to fight, the present power holders who took part in the Red Terror and who have never ceased campaigning against the organization (EPRP) that was targeted by the bloody repression, the nostalgic of the old regime who hold that generation responsible for the demise of their paradise. Haile Gerima can situate himself in one of these categories that I refer to as demons, charlatans and revisionists for he has not ceased, by film and words, from attacking the generation that fought for change, a fight in which he did not take part in any direct and meaningful way.
Haile Gerima told the Addis Abeba based FOCUS magazine (no 7, Jan-Feb 2009) "I don't even know what the Red Terror was all about". Admitting ignorance could have been one first useful step towards enlightenment but alas, no. Teza carries scenes that depict the Red Terror time but in a non factual way much as that Ethio-Canadian writer whose alleged memoir read as bad fiction and who lied that the EPRP would approach to recruit you and if you declined they just shot you point blanc. Haile recently told a New York Times interviewer the following: "I am from a generation that genuinely wanted a better society and to do something for poor and oppressed people, but which got blinded and lost and turned against its own humanity to become the opposite of what we wanted to be.” Haile says he is 64 years old and he sure is (age wise) from that generation but that does not mean he is of that generation that struggled for change. He stayed for more than 40 years in America and his involvement in the struggle of that generation, if any, was only peripheral, especially if we consider the period of the Red Terror and what followed. Haile told the same Focus interviewer " Oh ya, (I hate politics) because politics is an art of deception; all politicians are liars". As the Edward Said quote aptly explains if Haile makes film and thus makes politics and thereby his claim to hate politics is empty talk. I hate politics is by itself a political position/stand. Secondly, Haile claimed in the same FOCUS interview that he had not done "any Red Terror movie" (I actually think he has touched upon it at least in two films) because, in his own words, "First, I don't know the Red Terror and (second) I have not done it because it is not my experience." (Of course Haile says right after this he would like to make films about Lij Eyasu, Zerai Deres, love story of Menelik and Taytu--experiences he lived through perhaps!)
That generation genuinely wanted a better society and laid its own life for the emancipation of the poor and the oppressed. The commitment was not verbal, nor was it from afar. As Walelign and Tsegaye Gebre Medhin (aka Debteraw) wrote in the early seventies that generation knew that "the enemy of the Ethiopian people cannot come to Madison Garden for a fifteen rounds bout" and so the generation did not flee but confronted the beast in its own lair, i.e. in Ethiopia. An experience that was not lived through in any way by the film maker. But that generation did not get blinded and lost and did not at any point in time turn against its humanity. That each generation gets its own share of monsters and sycophants is almost a natural law but the generation that fought for change in Ethiopia did not lose its humanity or commitment to the cause of the people. It did not shrink from the sacrifice that the struggle called for, did not hide on an Amba or in foreign refuge claiming I hate politics. It was there with and amidst the people, living their fear and dying their death and dreaming their dreams and hopes. It just did not want "something" for the poor and the oppressed--it wanted their total liberation, their sovereignty. There were those who betrayed their vows but they never represented a generation and Haile's generalization not only errs but does injustice to a generation that history emulates. Such false premises and mistaken conclusions tar his films, especially the last one Teza.
The ongoing revision of History has targeted that generation that consciously and genuinely fought for change, defaming it in one way or another and trying to depict it as non Ethiopian. It is as if that generation turned against its culture and history while in actual fact that generation championed the history of resistance and fierce love for the country. What the revisionists actually chafe at is the fact that generation rose firmly against the injustice and oppression, the blind worship of temporal and absolute power, harmful traditions, oppression of women, bowing to the ferenji or the colonizer and in this way launched an upheaval, a revolution as it were, to end the feudal system and the autocracy. And, consequently also, to end the brutal military rule under whose boots many intellectual worms sought false refuge and comfort. Hence, the attack against that generation, the chorus against the vision and ideology of change, the championing of conservatism and conformism under the guise of being modern, aware, "siltun", the proliferation of scribes of modern Darkness at Noon stories, and of eulogies for capitalism and new breed oppressors, and in the final instance the recourse to reaction under the cover of rediscovering oneself, one's "true" identity, history and culture. One relives the Zemene Mesafint through Article 39, the ugly past is embraced wholly and as was, and the fiery Maoist becomes a hard line Copt, a weeping Pente or a bearded Wahabist, or even a monarchist to boot. We have seen it all but then again all this has nothing to do with that generation and much to do with those who rile and fume against the generation that genuinely struggled for meaningful change and got short-circuited by despots and tyrants.
Judgment without knowledge ends up as garbage. If Ato Haile Gerima has turned against his humanity then he has himself to blame in the first place. That generation was not blinded, was not lost, did know where it was going, was fully aware of its goals (not just "something for the poor"!) and more importantly was clear on the sacrifice needed to achieve it. And it did pay the ultimate sacrifice. So, a little bit of respect please. Ato Haile should follow his own advice and talk of things he knows about and make films on subjects he is not ignorant of. Otherwise, so long as we continue to breathe and exist we shall raise our pens and voices to defend the memory of the generation that cried "Away with all Pests" and bravely assaulted the fortresses of cowardice, philistinism, tyranny and oppression.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH CINEASTE HAILE GERIMA?
By KASSAHUN
First of all, let me get rid off the notion that the artist/the intellectual in a given society is/can be apolitical, uninvolved, non partisan. To quote an authority (as this seems to please certain quarters) let me cite the late and very committed intellectual, Edward Said, who wrote: (in Representation of the Intellectual, page 110)
"Every intellectual whose métier is articulating and representing specific views, ideas, ideologies, logically aspires to making them work in a society. The intellectual who claims to write only for him or herself, or for the sake of pure learning, or abstract science is not to be, and must not be, believed. As the great Twentieth century writer Jean Genet once said, the moment you publish essays (or make and distribute films--K) in a society you have entered political life; so if you want not to be political do not write essays or speak out" (or make films--K).
Famous Ethiopian film maker, Haile Gerima, often claims to be "beyond or outside" of politics. He is royally mistaken if he is talking honestly. For, the film maker dabbles in politics big time though he does so in a bad or wrong way. A renowned film maker, his most famous film (Samoa) deals with the slave trade and racism and in many interviews he has made it clear the issue of racism affects him deeply. So be it. His latest film, Teza (which has won some international awards) deals with Ethiopia and again with the question of racism, displacement and alienation. Haile Gerima says he knows little or nothing about the Red Terror but both in Teza and previously in another film chronicling his return to Ethiopia after the fall of the Derg regime he had to deal with it in his own way, with prejudice and a practical disservice to the martyrs and those still bearing the scars.
And here is where some of us have been forced to come in, to raise our voices in defense of our own history, to safeguard the memory of the martyrs, to honor our brave and steadfast comrades who sacrificed their dear lives or endured atrocities for the sake of their country and people. And in the process to commit lese majesty as some of these elements consider it a crime to utter even a mild word of criticism against them (of course having been out in the rain so often I am not that scared of such admonitions). It must be admitted that there is presently a fierce revisionist campaign being waged by a variety of forces to denigrate that generation that struggled against the imperial and the totalitarian military regimes for the sake of democratic change. The campaign is on but the commanders have different motives--some are covering up their criminal roles, others shamed by their cowardice and betrayal in those trying times and dishonorably attacking those who dared to fight, the present power holders who took part in the Red Terror and who have never ceased campaigning against the organization (EPRP) that was targeted by the bloody repression, the nostalgic of the old regime who hold that generation responsible for the demise of their paradise. Haile Gerima can situate himself in one of these categories that I refer to as demons, charlatans and revisionists for he has not ceased, by film and words, from attacking the generation that fought for change, a fight in which he did not take part in any direct and meaningful way.
Haile Gerima told the Addis Abeba based FOCUS magazine (no 7, Jan-Feb 2009) "I don't even know what the Red Terror was all about". Admitting ignorance could have been one first useful step towards enlightenment but alas, no. Teza carries scenes that depict the Red Terror time but in a non factual way much as that Ethio-Canadian writer whose alleged memoir read as bad fiction and who lied that the EPRP would approach to recruit you and if you declined they just shot you point blanc. Haile recently told a New York Times interviewer the following: "I am from a generation that genuinely wanted a better society and to do something for poor and oppressed people, but which got blinded and lost and turned against its own humanity to become the opposite of what we wanted to be.” Haile says he is 64 years old and he sure is (age wise) from that generation but that does not mean he is of that generation that struggled for change. He stayed for more than 40 years in America and his involvement in the struggle of that generation, if any, was only peripheral, especially if we consider the period of the Red Terror and what followed. Haile told the same Focus interviewer " Oh ya, (I hate politics) because politics is an art of deception; all politicians are liars". As the Edward Said quote aptly explains if Haile makes film and thus makes politics and thereby his claim to hate politics is empty talk. I hate politics is by itself a political position/stand. Secondly, Haile claimed in the same FOCUS interview that he had not done "any Red Terror movie" (I actually think he has touched upon it at least in two films) because, in his own words, "First, I don't know the Red Terror and (second) I have not done it because it is not my experience." (Of course Haile says right after this he would like to make films about Lij Eyasu, Zerai Deres, love story of Menelik and Taytu--experiences he lived through perhaps!)
That generation genuinely wanted a better society and laid its own life for the emancipation of the poor and the oppressed. The commitment was not verbal, nor was it from afar. As Walelign and Tsegaye Gebre Medhin (aka Debteraw) wrote in the early seventies that generation knew that "the enemy of the Ethiopian people cannot come to Madison Garden for a fifteen rounds bout" and so the generation did not flee but confronted the beast in its own lair, i.e. in Ethiopia. An experience that was not lived through in any way by the film maker. But that generation did not get blinded and lost and did not at any point in time turn against its humanity. That each generation gets its own share of monsters and sycophants is almost a natural law but the generation that fought for change in Ethiopia did not lose its humanity or commitment to the cause of the people. It did not shrink from the sacrifice that the struggle called for, did not hide on an Amba or in foreign refuge claiming I hate politics. It was there with and amidst the people, living their fear and dying their death and dreaming their dreams and hopes. It just did not want "something" for the poor and the oppressed--it wanted their total liberation, their sovereignty. There were those who betrayed their vows but they never represented a generation and Haile's generalization not only errs but does injustice to a generation that history emulates. Such false premises and mistaken conclusions tar his films, especially the last one Teza.
The ongoing revision of History has targeted that generation that consciously and genuinely fought for change, defaming it in one way or another and trying to depict it as non Ethiopian. It is as if that generation turned against its culture and history while in actual fact that generation championed the history of resistance and fierce love for the country. What the revisionists actually chafe at is the fact that generation rose firmly against the injustice and oppression, the blind worship of temporal and absolute power, harmful traditions, oppression of women, bowing to the ferenji or the colonizer and in this way launched an upheaval, a revolution as it were, to end the feudal system and the autocracy. And, consequently also, to end the brutal military rule under whose boots many intellectual worms sought false refuge and comfort. Hence, the attack against that generation, the chorus against the vision and ideology of change, the championing of conservatism and conformism under the guise of being modern, aware, "siltun", the proliferation of scribes of modern Darkness at Noon stories, and of eulogies for capitalism and new breed oppressors, and in the final instance the recourse to reaction under the cover of rediscovering oneself, one's "true" identity, history and culture. One relives the Zemene Mesafint through Article 39, the ugly past is embraced wholly and as was, and the fiery Maoist becomes a hard line Copt, a weeping Pente or a bearded Wahabist, or even a monarchist to boot. We have seen it all but then again all this has nothing to do with that generation and much to do with those who rile and fume against the generation that genuinely struggled for meaningful change and got short-circuited by despots and tyrants.
Judgment without knowledge ends up as garbage. If Ato Haile Gerima has turned against his humanity then he has himself to blame in the first place. That generation was not blinded, was not lost, did know where it was going, was fully aware of its goals (not just "something for the poor"!) and more importantly was clear on the sacrifice needed to achieve it. And it did pay the ultimate sacrifice. So, a little bit of respect please. Ato Haile should follow his own advice and talk of things he knows about and make films on subjects he is not ignorant of. Otherwise, so long as we continue to breathe and exist we shall raise our pens and voices to defend the memory of the generation that cried "Away with all Pests" and bravely assaulted the fortresses of cowardice, philistinism, tyranny and oppression.
WAS THE REVOLUTION.....
WAS THE REVOLUTION TRAGIC AND BRUTAL?
by Kassahun
Someone close to my taste said "what is very tragic is to sleep through a Revolution", doing a Rip Van Winkle on the momentous event shaking the given country. Let me state from the outset that I have not (yet) read the book by Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion's Gaze) and I do not know the person or the politics of the reviewer of her book, Ato Abebe Gelaw. However, his labelling of the February 1974 Revolution (Yekatit 66) as tragic and brutal spurred me to write the following lines. More motivation has also come from others who have been revising History and projecting that popular revolution in negative terms and also by the denial of the Red Terror made by the lamentable Dr, Hailu Araya (a Derg loyalist now wearing another mask) and criminals trying to hide their past despicable deeds.
No lie can live forever said another wise man. The same man who penned the poem of the truth on the scaffold and the lie on the throne. Was the February Revolution tragic? Like the Russian revolution of 1917 can it be bombarded with the question: were you premature? Was it brutal? Did it usher in a period of violence and brutality that was, as implied in Ato Abebe's comment, unknown in our past? Revolutions do not occur out of the blue though they may appear spontaneous. For all Revolutions, the Time comes, none are really premature. The Yekatit 66 Revolution exploded because it was time for it to do so, the feudal system had become moribund, the people were fed up with their condition and more importantly determined to sacrifice all to bring change. And the ruling class was unable to govern as before, its crisis had come to a head, its mechanisms of control totally derailed. The Revolution had to be and thus it came about surprising even those who had been expecting it, it was not, however, premature.
It was not tragic either. It was a people's revolution that erupted to put an end to a feudal system, to the autocracy of Emperor Haile Sellasie. And it did just that. It was thus a successful revolution that brought victory to the people. The Revolution was hijacked by military officers--that was what became tragic. That was what brought in the brutality as the officers could not peacefully defeat the popular unrest and struggle against the military rule. When it comes to violence, it must be said without any qualms at all that violence has been endemic, part of the Ethiopian systems for decades if not centuries. The campaigns of the Emperor's (we can mention Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik) were very brutal, and violence and cruel treatment of the civilian population has been sown into the politics, the means of governance. In this way, the States were all absolute, all were violent. For the people, the State has always been alien, cruel, capricious, something on top of them, heavy. It is in the respect that Ato Abebe's reference to Hobbes becomes relevant: Here is what he wrote as he reviewed Maaza's book:
"The tragic 1974 revolution was not just a bumpy transition from a feudo-capitalist monarchy to a more progressive system as we were told time and again. It was also the beginning of untold brutality that has still continued to haunt us. It is a story of man against man, comrade against comrade, citizen against citizen…. It was simply akin to what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a state of nature, where “men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man." In the state of nature life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.".
The February Revolution did not usher in "untold brutality" but the counter revolution just continued what was imbedded in the political system of Ethiopia--rule by violence and terror. The violence did not just begin, it was there, it was revived by a brutal military regime. And what followed was not a state of nature by any stretch of imagination. Hobbes mechanistic view of life or what some called his "philosophy of fear" does not apply here. The Red Terror was not a free for all, citizen against citizen, comrade against comrade. Hobbes state of nature was inapplicable by all accounts . The State was neither Leviathan nor the violence haphazard and aimless. After the Revolution was hijacked by the former bosses of Dr, Hailu, that is the Derg, there was popular protest mainly organized by the EPRP. The demand for a provisional popular government was tabled, the Revolution and the people needed no military guardian it was said. This popular protest was confronted in a short while by the violence of the State as the Ethiopian State, almost instinctively, resorts to violence when challenged. I leave out here the futile argument by the criminals of the Red Terror who want to allege that the EPRP launched what they so wrongly call the "white terror" and "forced the Derg to resort to the Red Terror". The truth cannot be hanged always and the fact remains that the repression and the violence was launched by the military regime and its intellectual allies grouped within the POMOA. The scenario of a peaceful and gentle military clique being catapulted into the realm of violence and terror by provocation on the part of the people is ridiculous and would have been funny had it not involved the deaths of hundreds of thousands. That aside, the violence was not a free for all and haphazard---the State unleashed its terror on the people, on the EPRP and its supporters. The Terror had clear cut aims: to destroy the EPRP and to cow the people unto fearful obedience. On the part of the EPRP, its actions were directed at those perceived as enemies of the people. That the Red Terror was so vast does not belie the fact that it had its aims, knew its targets and objectives. Thus, the Hobbesian State of nature, of a war pitting every man against every other man was not the reality of the Red Terror or the violent period that followed the February Revolution.
Not having read Maaza's book, I sincerely hope that her rendition of the events of that period (even if fictionalized) does not echo this aspect of the reviewer's interpretation or the crowning of lies in the form of a memoir attempted by another writer called Nega Mezlekia in "his" first book. The February Revolution is a historic event in the annals of our people as it was practically the first instance of a popular revolt overthrowing a brutal regime. It was historic also because of the fact that the Revolution had noble aims, not the coming to power of another ambitious despot but the transformation of the society in a democratic way, the empowerment of the people for the first time in the history of Ethiopia. Hence, it was neither tragic nor brutal and one should take care not to confuse a revolution with its sequel of a counter revolution that negates the revolution itself to take its place. As one revolutionary put it "Revolution, in history, is like the doctor assisting at the birth of a new life, who will not use forceps unless necessary, but who will use them unhesitatingly every time labor requires them. It is a labor bringing the hope of a better life to the enslaved and exploited masses". That was the February Revolution. The brutality came after, with the counterrevolution of the Derg.
Admirers and those nostalgic of the dead and gone imperial regime have never pardoned the progressives whom they hold responsible for the end of their beloved regime and monarchy. A vigorous attempt to revise History has been put in place with endearing and eulogizing (Ababa Janhoy) pseudo biographies of Haile Sellasie being printed. That system, that autocracy was rotten to the core and a curse on the majority of the people of Ethiopia. The revision cannot prevail-- the time is short and those with the memories and the wounds are still alive and around. The February Revolution was thus a tragedy to the ruling class of that period and a historic and beautiful event for the people who succeeded to get rid of a backward system. What followed is another matter altogether as the fall of the Mengistu regime would not be considered a bad thing just because those that replaced him are not any better. Revisionists may, to quote Brecht, wish "to dissolve the people and elect another" but the people cannot be wished or washed away and their memory, stifled as it may be at any given time, stays vivid and alive. For those of us who fought for a Revolution, Yekatiit 66 was a festival that, we hope, gets repeated against the present regime too.
The age of big ideas and robust ideologies may be over but that period of the Revolution cannot be analysed or investigated devoid of its ideological reality. Those who want to rewrite History and allege that "the intellectuals massacred one another" are not only factually wrong but also intellectually uninformed. The truth is that the military dictatorship slaughtered the people; it was not a mere spectator or a secondary player in the tragedy of the Terror. It was the perpetrator of the carnage it called the Red Performance (key tiryit ). Hailu Araya is feebly trying to cover up this fact when he blatantly denied there was any red Terror in the first place. History will not absolve but condemn him thoroughly along with his former masters and as those who deny the Holocaust are guilty of a crime so is the shameless Hailu who has denied the brutal killing of more than 250,000 Ethiopians by the regime he served so loyally to the end. Yesterday's Marxists (Hailu and company) are today's liberals, eulogizing the market, admiring pluralism, swallowing their every spit against the system they had been castigating as anti people. This conversion has not, however, led them to reassess their role and nefarious practices in the fallen system/regime, none of them have recanted or asked forgiveness from the people they had hurt so much. They have just glided smoothly, with no conscience harassing them, from being the loyalists of a Terrorist regime (that of Mengistu) to loyal followers of another equally murderous one but this time conveniently and gratuitously labelling themselves "the opposition". That being the case they justify their previous crimes by denying it altogether or by alleging that their regime "was provoked" to excesses and also by doing a somersault back to the February Revolution which they firmly castigate as "brutal, a mistake, a curse brought upon us by young devils imbued with a foreign ideology".
Forget utopian vision for today the very imagination of a better world has been dimmed and the prevailing tendency is to regress into condemning the past during which courageous people not only dreamed of a better world but fought and died to make it real. Valiant citizens who still echo Che's cry : Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, that another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and that other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
Long Live the February Revolution!
by Kassahun
Someone close to my taste said "what is very tragic is to sleep through a Revolution", doing a Rip Van Winkle on the momentous event shaking the given country. Let me state from the outset that I have not (yet) read the book by Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion's Gaze) and I do not know the person or the politics of the reviewer of her book, Ato Abebe Gelaw. However, his labelling of the February 1974 Revolution (Yekatit 66) as tragic and brutal spurred me to write the following lines. More motivation has also come from others who have been revising History and projecting that popular revolution in negative terms and also by the denial of the Red Terror made by the lamentable Dr, Hailu Araya (a Derg loyalist now wearing another mask) and criminals trying to hide their past despicable deeds.
No lie can live forever said another wise man. The same man who penned the poem of the truth on the scaffold and the lie on the throne. Was the February Revolution tragic? Like the Russian revolution of 1917 can it be bombarded with the question: were you premature? Was it brutal? Did it usher in a period of violence and brutality that was, as implied in Ato Abebe's comment, unknown in our past? Revolutions do not occur out of the blue though they may appear spontaneous. For all Revolutions, the Time comes, none are really premature. The Yekatit 66 Revolution exploded because it was time for it to do so, the feudal system had become moribund, the people were fed up with their condition and more importantly determined to sacrifice all to bring change. And the ruling class was unable to govern as before, its crisis had come to a head, its mechanisms of control totally derailed. The Revolution had to be and thus it came about surprising even those who had been expecting it, it was not, however, premature.
It was not tragic either. It was a people's revolution that erupted to put an end to a feudal system, to the autocracy of Emperor Haile Sellasie. And it did just that. It was thus a successful revolution that brought victory to the people. The Revolution was hijacked by military officers--that was what became tragic. That was what brought in the brutality as the officers could not peacefully defeat the popular unrest and struggle against the military rule. When it comes to violence, it must be said without any qualms at all that violence has been endemic, part of the Ethiopian systems for decades if not centuries. The campaigns of the Emperor's (we can mention Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik) were very brutal, and violence and cruel treatment of the civilian population has been sown into the politics, the means of governance. In this way, the States were all absolute, all were violent. For the people, the State has always been alien, cruel, capricious, something on top of them, heavy. It is in the respect that Ato Abebe's reference to Hobbes becomes relevant: Here is what he wrote as he reviewed Maaza's book:
"The tragic 1974 revolution was not just a bumpy transition from a feudo-capitalist monarchy to a more progressive system as we were told time and again. It was also the beginning of untold brutality that has still continued to haunt us. It is a story of man against man, comrade against comrade, citizen against citizen…. It was simply akin to what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a state of nature, where “men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man." In the state of nature life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.".
The February Revolution did not usher in "untold brutality" but the counter revolution just continued what was imbedded in the political system of Ethiopia--rule by violence and terror. The violence did not just begin, it was there, it was revived by a brutal military regime. And what followed was not a state of nature by any stretch of imagination. Hobbes mechanistic view of life or what some called his "philosophy of fear" does not apply here. The Red Terror was not a free for all, citizen against citizen, comrade against comrade. Hobbes state of nature was inapplicable by all accounts . The State was neither Leviathan nor the violence haphazard and aimless. After the Revolution was hijacked by the former bosses of Dr, Hailu, that is the Derg, there was popular protest mainly organized by the EPRP. The demand for a provisional popular government was tabled, the Revolution and the people needed no military guardian it was said. This popular protest was confronted in a short while by the violence of the State as the Ethiopian State, almost instinctively, resorts to violence when challenged. I leave out here the futile argument by the criminals of the Red Terror who want to allege that the EPRP launched what they so wrongly call the "white terror" and "forced the Derg to resort to the Red Terror". The truth cannot be hanged always and the fact remains that the repression and the violence was launched by the military regime and its intellectual allies grouped within the POMOA. The scenario of a peaceful and gentle military clique being catapulted into the realm of violence and terror by provocation on the part of the people is ridiculous and would have been funny had it not involved the deaths of hundreds of thousands. That aside, the violence was not a free for all and haphazard---the State unleashed its terror on the people, on the EPRP and its supporters. The Terror had clear cut aims: to destroy the EPRP and to cow the people unto fearful obedience. On the part of the EPRP, its actions were directed at those perceived as enemies of the people. That the Red Terror was so vast does not belie the fact that it had its aims, knew its targets and objectives. Thus, the Hobbesian State of nature, of a war pitting every man against every other man was not the reality of the Red Terror or the violent period that followed the February Revolution.
Not having read Maaza's book, I sincerely hope that her rendition of the events of that period (even if fictionalized) does not echo this aspect of the reviewer's interpretation or the crowning of lies in the form of a memoir attempted by another writer called Nega Mezlekia in "his" first book. The February Revolution is a historic event in the annals of our people as it was practically the first instance of a popular revolt overthrowing a brutal regime. It was historic also because of the fact that the Revolution had noble aims, not the coming to power of another ambitious despot but the transformation of the society in a democratic way, the empowerment of the people for the first time in the history of Ethiopia. Hence, it was neither tragic nor brutal and one should take care not to confuse a revolution with its sequel of a counter revolution that negates the revolution itself to take its place. As one revolutionary put it "Revolution, in history, is like the doctor assisting at the birth of a new life, who will not use forceps unless necessary, but who will use them unhesitatingly every time labor requires them. It is a labor bringing the hope of a better life to the enslaved and exploited masses". That was the February Revolution. The brutality came after, with the counterrevolution of the Derg.
Admirers and those nostalgic of the dead and gone imperial regime have never pardoned the progressives whom they hold responsible for the end of their beloved regime and monarchy. A vigorous attempt to revise History has been put in place with endearing and eulogizing (Ababa Janhoy) pseudo biographies of Haile Sellasie being printed. That system, that autocracy was rotten to the core and a curse on the majority of the people of Ethiopia. The revision cannot prevail-- the time is short and those with the memories and the wounds are still alive and around. The February Revolution was thus a tragedy to the ruling class of that period and a historic and beautiful event for the people who succeeded to get rid of a backward system. What followed is another matter altogether as the fall of the Mengistu regime would not be considered a bad thing just because those that replaced him are not any better. Revisionists may, to quote Brecht, wish "to dissolve the people and elect another" but the people cannot be wished or washed away and their memory, stifled as it may be at any given time, stays vivid and alive. For those of us who fought for a Revolution, Yekatiit 66 was a festival that, we hope, gets repeated against the present regime too.
The age of big ideas and robust ideologies may be over but that period of the Revolution cannot be analysed or investigated devoid of its ideological reality. Those who want to rewrite History and allege that "the intellectuals massacred one another" are not only factually wrong but also intellectually uninformed. The truth is that the military dictatorship slaughtered the people; it was not a mere spectator or a secondary player in the tragedy of the Terror. It was the perpetrator of the carnage it called the Red Performance (key tiryit ). Hailu Araya is feebly trying to cover up this fact when he blatantly denied there was any red Terror in the first place. History will not absolve but condemn him thoroughly along with his former masters and as those who deny the Holocaust are guilty of a crime so is the shameless Hailu who has denied the brutal killing of more than 250,000 Ethiopians by the regime he served so loyally to the end. Yesterday's Marxists (Hailu and company) are today's liberals, eulogizing the market, admiring pluralism, swallowing their every spit against the system they had been castigating as anti people. This conversion has not, however, led them to reassess their role and nefarious practices in the fallen system/regime, none of them have recanted or asked forgiveness from the people they had hurt so much. They have just glided smoothly, with no conscience harassing them, from being the loyalists of a Terrorist regime (that of Mengistu) to loyal followers of another equally murderous one but this time conveniently and gratuitously labelling themselves "the opposition". That being the case they justify their previous crimes by denying it altogether or by alleging that their regime "was provoked" to excesses and also by doing a somersault back to the February Revolution which they firmly castigate as "brutal, a mistake, a curse brought upon us by young devils imbued with a foreign ideology".
Forget utopian vision for today the very imagination of a better world has been dimmed and the prevailing tendency is to regress into condemning the past during which courageous people not only dreamed of a better world but fought and died to make it real. Valiant citizens who still echo Che's cry : Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, that another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and that other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
Long Live the February Revolution!
THE TIME OF THE BLOVIATORS
THE TIME OF THE BLOVIATORS
or
HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN FIVE HUNDRED WORDS
by Hama Tuma
I am sure not many of you know the word bloviator--I did not till someone told me to check it in Google. It means pompous, someone who puffs his chest and makes boastful declarations. The word defines many Ethiopian pseudo and self declared intellectuals of our time. Of course, who is an intellectual is worthy of a debate these days. One who finished Scondary School? Anyone with a diploma or a degree from a foreign institution? Who? Anyone with that Dr or Professor tag? Any fool who speaks averagely coherent English? Anyone with delusions of grandeur? Feelings of elitism?
Sadly, the bloviators are too many. They start out with the assumption that speaking and writing English is expensive to begin with. Not for you and me poor souls with miserable monthly incomes if any. African intellectuals, totally brainwashed alas, boast: "we learnt at the foot of the white man" which, it seems, give them the right and capacity to tell a plant from afar by just sniffing at the air. Ethiopian intellectuals fall in the same pit: their credential is the foreign/ferenji degree, earned in most cases not even from credible or prestigious places, sometimes from correspondence universities who will give you a degree even if you fail!(check Meles, Tamrat and other mentally challenged TPLF officials). Yet, the Dr or Professor tag is all, supreme, it tell us all to shut up and listen, the bloviators have a degree, they are "intellos" par excellence. Alas, they are shallow, ignoramus to boot, word spinners, not worth the ink on their so called degrees. Take time off to listen to any of the loud pal talk rooms and you will hear many not only punctuating but drowning their Amharic with English phrases. Words like State, information, intelligence, saboteur (actually said "sabotateur" by our hyphenated souls), agenda, diversify, struggle, oppression, etc are words that seem to have no Amharic equivalent. I had previously attempted to call upon them to be modest and received a tongue lashing for may alleged "jealousy" concerning their degrees which, I am proud to say, will not accept even if offered on a golden platter.
The half baked "bloviators" use English words to impress, to be unintelligible to my mother and yours, to be pompous. I wish I had written all this in Amharic but as I am trying to deal with those who write and speak pompously in English I have chosen the foreign language and by implication cornered myself in the dilemma. Why can't we write our pieces in our own language so that the majority of our people understand what we are trying to say? The hypocritical attempt is to be above the mundane as it were, to rise above the masses, to parade before them with puffed out chest, to show we know and do speak English and can write articles in it no matter the spelling and grammar errors. We boast and silence our own parents and people, and fools as we are we feel proud as we shame ourselves. Delusion is taken as knowledge, ignorance becomes wisdom and we deny our identity to find some mirage of a respect for our demeaned self. The more they bloviate, the more they become incomprehensible, shallow and hollow. The exercise is to say nothing in many words, to use phrases from the Thesaurus, to say perambulate instead of walk, to sound like a Southern USA fiery Baptist preacher, to pepper one's articles with quotes and references that are either out of place or pedestrian. I remember one "bloviator" who had to refer to Galbraith or Tagore to tell us "yenat hod zingurgur new". The worth of an intellectual is thus situated firmly in an Ivory Tower, away from the majority of the common people, saying not I fell but declaring my verticality changed to a horizontality. One Weyane scribe, a former "tiraz netek" of the bars in Washington, recently wrote from Addis Abeba a vitriolic attack against Isayas Afewerki (of course in English and to please his Masters), and informed us of the need to "indigenize democracy in a collectivist African cultural matrix". Now, what the hell does this mean other than bloviating over our heads parading as a deep thinker, philosopher and a master of the foreign language? There is another Ethiopian who writes incomprehensible regular columns and whom I tried to criticize mildly and provoked his adoring fans (who do not understand what he writes but admire him just for that) to attack me with venom. One asked me in anger "who are you?" and I must admit I was tempted to do a French on her and answer back "I am still searching for my identity" (the French like such replies and will not make it easy where they can complicate). Fake through and through, inferiority complex of the highest order when our so called intellectuals (many have become professors recently by some collective baptism like the Moonies) look down upon our language, culture, heroes (every political pretender is taken as a Mandela if he or she lands in prison for a month or a year), and our own experience.
The bloviators are also official scribes of the dictatorship. One such pathetic person, a stain on the proud history of her martyred brothers and cousins, recently wrote the following effusive nonsense:
"It is such an incredible win and an amazing era for us to witness the open and fast gain of Ethiopia’s democracy these past eighteen years. Never in the history of Ethiopia have we witnessed such an open dialogue. A free expression of ideas among different parties is what we are witnessing for the fourth democratic election. It is so heartwarming and encouraging for those of us that live outside Ethiopia to have the privilege of being eyewitnesses to the myriad developments that is going on in the country. Thanks to humanity’s elevation of technology we are privy to follow the events of the country on a daily basis" If this is not empty talk what is? Democracy and the Meles regime are anathema, incompatible, opposites. The regime she lauds is known as the predator of the free press, the enemy of free expression, a repressive one holding some thirty five thousand political prisoners behind bars, has committed many massacres, is the one that disappeared dozens in its dungeons and practices systematic and wide spread torture. That makes the woman who wrote the above eulogy either totally ignorant or a shameless sell out. She says nothing in so many words even if she may gain some favors from her Masters in Addis Abeba. The art of saying nothing in five hundred words is often mastered by bloviators and the state of our intellectuals is such that they have all become experts at it. They want to browbeat us with verbosity, with the usage of "hard" English phrases and concepts (which they use not in the correct sense but who cares?), with their determined refusal to use their own language to communicate. I must say I am not amongst those African authors who insist that writers must write in their mother tongue or stop writing ( though the usefulness of communicating in one's language cannot be denied) but the impact of a political message is if it reaches a broad cross section of the people and influences them. Last time I checked 95% of Ethiopians are not very familiar with the Queen's English and if truth be told not many of our self declared intellectuals write proper grammatically correct English either, notwithstanding their tendency to resort to English when they could communicate better in their own language. I could even be mistaken in this assumption of mine as most of them have no clear idea of what they want to utter and whether they do it in English or Amharic ( or any other mother tongue) their mumbo jumbo is not saved from being just that.
Alas, to add insult to injury (be inkirt lye joro degif) our bloviating intellectuals are not funny. Just take the above crazy eulogy and try to say you find it funny. It is actually boring, pathetic, an example of dog- like snivelling and servitude not to say shameful narrow ethnic identification. In other contexts, bloviators can be funny--they are so ridiculous that they become clowns. He was not an intellectual per se but Debella Dinsa comes to mind while in the imperial regime Yilma Deressa was another example of the funny officials. Our present day official scribes cum intellectuals take themselves too seriously as they bloviate and thus are dour and never funny. Otherwise their declaration of democracy under Meles Zenawi should have cracked us up but they believe in it and so they squeeze out the funny in their declaration. George Bush and Rumsfeld were funny with their declarations., they pretended to believe their lies but we all knew they were playacting like their claim of WMDs in Iraq. Take Rumsfeld's foray into The Unknown:
"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002.
Is not this a gem? Such bloviators can and should flourish to give grim politics a funny tinge.
Meles Zenawi, who got his degrees from a correspondence course, also plays at being an intellectual but his feeble bloviating come out disgusting and only fools take his street smart talk as a sign of intelligence.
The redefinition of the intellectual is called for in the Ethiopian context unless we confine ourselves to the basic definition of the intellectual as someone who attempts to speak English, tries to use confusing words, and is irredeemably alien to his own people and lies as a matter of routine. Come to think of it, this defines our intellectuals "indigenized in their own matrix". Whatever that may mean of course.
or
HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN FIVE HUNDRED WORDS
by Hama Tuma
I am sure not many of you know the word bloviator--I did not till someone told me to check it in Google. It means pompous, someone who puffs his chest and makes boastful declarations. The word defines many Ethiopian pseudo and self declared intellectuals of our time. Of course, who is an intellectual is worthy of a debate these days. One who finished Scondary School? Anyone with a diploma or a degree from a foreign institution? Who? Anyone with that Dr or Professor tag? Any fool who speaks averagely coherent English? Anyone with delusions of grandeur? Feelings of elitism?
Sadly, the bloviators are too many. They start out with the assumption that speaking and writing English is expensive to begin with. Not for you and me poor souls with miserable monthly incomes if any. African intellectuals, totally brainwashed alas, boast: "we learnt at the foot of the white man" which, it seems, give them the right and capacity to tell a plant from afar by just sniffing at the air. Ethiopian intellectuals fall in the same pit: their credential is the foreign/ferenji degree, earned in most cases not even from credible or prestigious places, sometimes from correspondence universities who will give you a degree even if you fail!(check Meles, Tamrat and other mentally challenged TPLF officials). Yet, the Dr or Professor tag is all, supreme, it tell us all to shut up and listen, the bloviators have a degree, they are "intellos" par excellence. Alas, they are shallow, ignoramus to boot, word spinners, not worth the ink on their so called degrees. Take time off to listen to any of the loud pal talk rooms and you will hear many not only punctuating but drowning their Amharic with English phrases. Words like State, information, intelligence, saboteur (actually said "sabotateur" by our hyphenated souls), agenda, diversify, struggle, oppression, etc are words that seem to have no Amharic equivalent. I had previously attempted to call upon them to be modest and received a tongue lashing for may alleged "jealousy" concerning their degrees which, I am proud to say, will not accept even if offered on a golden platter.
The half baked "bloviators" use English words to impress, to be unintelligible to my mother and yours, to be pompous. I wish I had written all this in Amharic but as I am trying to deal with those who write and speak pompously in English I have chosen the foreign language and by implication cornered myself in the dilemma. Why can't we write our pieces in our own language so that the majority of our people understand what we are trying to say? The hypocritical attempt is to be above the mundane as it were, to rise above the masses, to parade before them with puffed out chest, to show we know and do speak English and can write articles in it no matter the spelling and grammar errors. We boast and silence our own parents and people, and fools as we are we feel proud as we shame ourselves. Delusion is taken as knowledge, ignorance becomes wisdom and we deny our identity to find some mirage of a respect for our demeaned self. The more they bloviate, the more they become incomprehensible, shallow and hollow. The exercise is to say nothing in many words, to use phrases from the Thesaurus, to say perambulate instead of walk, to sound like a Southern USA fiery Baptist preacher, to pepper one's articles with quotes and references that are either out of place or pedestrian. I remember one "bloviator" who had to refer to Galbraith or Tagore to tell us "yenat hod zingurgur new". The worth of an intellectual is thus situated firmly in an Ivory Tower, away from the majority of the common people, saying not I fell but declaring my verticality changed to a horizontality. One Weyane scribe, a former "tiraz netek" of the bars in Washington, recently wrote from Addis Abeba a vitriolic attack against Isayas Afewerki (of course in English and to please his Masters), and informed us of the need to "indigenize democracy in a collectivist African cultural matrix". Now, what the hell does this mean other than bloviating over our heads parading as a deep thinker, philosopher and a master of the foreign language? There is another Ethiopian who writes incomprehensible regular columns and whom I tried to criticize mildly and provoked his adoring fans (who do not understand what he writes but admire him just for that) to attack me with venom. One asked me in anger "who are you?" and I must admit I was tempted to do a French on her and answer back "I am still searching for my identity" (the French like such replies and will not make it easy where they can complicate). Fake through and through, inferiority complex of the highest order when our so called intellectuals (many have become professors recently by some collective baptism like the Moonies) look down upon our language, culture, heroes (every political pretender is taken as a Mandela if he or she lands in prison for a month or a year), and our own experience.
The bloviators are also official scribes of the dictatorship. One such pathetic person, a stain on the proud history of her martyred brothers and cousins, recently wrote the following effusive nonsense:
"It is such an incredible win and an amazing era for us to witness the open and fast gain of Ethiopia’s democracy these past eighteen years. Never in the history of Ethiopia have we witnessed such an open dialogue. A free expression of ideas among different parties is what we are witnessing for the fourth democratic election. It is so heartwarming and encouraging for those of us that live outside Ethiopia to have the privilege of being eyewitnesses to the myriad developments that is going on in the country. Thanks to humanity’s elevation of technology we are privy to follow the events of the country on a daily basis" If this is not empty talk what is? Democracy and the Meles regime are anathema, incompatible, opposites. The regime she lauds is known as the predator of the free press, the enemy of free expression, a repressive one holding some thirty five thousand political prisoners behind bars, has committed many massacres, is the one that disappeared dozens in its dungeons and practices systematic and wide spread torture. That makes the woman who wrote the above eulogy either totally ignorant or a shameless sell out. She says nothing in so many words even if she may gain some favors from her Masters in Addis Abeba. The art of saying nothing in five hundred words is often mastered by bloviators and the state of our intellectuals is such that they have all become experts at it. They want to browbeat us with verbosity, with the usage of "hard" English phrases and concepts (which they use not in the correct sense but who cares?), with their determined refusal to use their own language to communicate. I must say I am not amongst those African authors who insist that writers must write in their mother tongue or stop writing ( though the usefulness of communicating in one's language cannot be denied) but the impact of a political message is if it reaches a broad cross section of the people and influences them. Last time I checked 95% of Ethiopians are not very familiar with the Queen's English and if truth be told not many of our self declared intellectuals write proper grammatically correct English either, notwithstanding their tendency to resort to English when they could communicate better in their own language. I could even be mistaken in this assumption of mine as most of them have no clear idea of what they want to utter and whether they do it in English or Amharic ( or any other mother tongue) their mumbo jumbo is not saved from being just that.
Alas, to add insult to injury (be inkirt lye joro degif) our bloviating intellectuals are not funny. Just take the above crazy eulogy and try to say you find it funny. It is actually boring, pathetic, an example of dog- like snivelling and servitude not to say shameful narrow ethnic identification. In other contexts, bloviators can be funny--they are so ridiculous that they become clowns. He was not an intellectual per se but Debella Dinsa comes to mind while in the imperial regime Yilma Deressa was another example of the funny officials. Our present day official scribes cum intellectuals take themselves too seriously as they bloviate and thus are dour and never funny. Otherwise their declaration of democracy under Meles Zenawi should have cracked us up but they believe in it and so they squeeze out the funny in their declaration. George Bush and Rumsfeld were funny with their declarations., they pretended to believe their lies but we all knew they were playacting like their claim of WMDs in Iraq. Take Rumsfeld's foray into The Unknown:
"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002.
Is not this a gem? Such bloviators can and should flourish to give grim politics a funny tinge.
Meles Zenawi, who got his degrees from a correspondence course, also plays at being an intellectual but his feeble bloviating come out disgusting and only fools take his street smart talk as a sign of intelligence.
The redefinition of the intellectual is called for in the Ethiopian context unless we confine ourselves to the basic definition of the intellectual as someone who attempts to speak English, tries to use confusing words, and is irredeemably alien to his own people and lies as a matter of routine. Come to think of it, this defines our intellectuals "indigenized in their own matrix". Whatever that may mean of course.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Ali Saeed in Action
Winnipeg man troubled by airport security findings
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 | 8:19 PM CT Comments95Recommend50.
CBC News
Ali Saeed says traces of explosives were inexplicably found on his hands during an airport security check. Officials have apologized. (CBC)
An award-winning human rights activist based in Winnipeg says he's now afraid to fly after security screeners at the city's airport found traces of an explosive compound on his hands during a random security check.
Ali Saeed was travelling to Colorado in January for a screening of a self-produced documentary detailing the story of his life, which included periods of being jailed and tortured as a political prisoner in the African countries of Ethiopia and Somalia.
While going through security at the James Richardson International Airport on his way to a U.S. departure gate, Saeed said he was pulled aside by officials with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA).
His hands were swabbed with a chemical and then he had to place his hands into a machine, he said.
He was then told traces of trinitrotoluene – or TNT, an explosive material — were found.
He said he had no idea why his hands set off alarm bells.
'Is it human error, is it the machine error or am I being labelled because I'm Islam name?'
—Ali Saeed"She said, 'you have got contact with explosive material — TNT,'" Saeed told CBC News. "I don't know what TNT means. Is it candy, is it sandwich? I don't know what this explosive material is."
Saeed said he was allowed to board his plane and his return flight home to Winnipeg was uneventful, but he is concerned because CATSA told him the information about the incident will be kept on file for future reference.
He worries the information could come back to haunt him because of his activist past and Islamic-sounding name.
"Is it human error, is it the machine error, or am I being labelled because [of my] Islam name?" he wonders.
Policy not followed
In a letter to Saeed, CATSA apologized and admitted that officials at the airport broke protocol by telling him about their findings.
"CATSA's procedures stipulate that screening officers must not discuss an … alarm with passengers," the letter said.
"We are sorry that this is not what occurred. We extend our sincere apologies for the screening officers' actions and the stress it caused you."
On Tuesday, an agency spokesperson told CBC News that Saeed will not have any trouble travelling in the future, and will send him a letter telling him so.
In December, Saeed was awarded the 2009 Human Rights Commitment Award of Manitoba by the Manitoba and Canadian Human Rights Commissions for his work in sponsoring refugees from Ethiopia.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2010/02/17/human-rights-activist-winnipeg-airport.html#ixzz0gZhiR5Tc
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 | 8:19 PM CT Comments95Recommend50.
CBC News
Ali Saeed says traces of explosives were inexplicably found on his hands during an airport security check. Officials have apologized. (CBC)
An award-winning human rights activist based in Winnipeg says he's now afraid to fly after security screeners at the city's airport found traces of an explosive compound on his hands during a random security check.
Ali Saeed was travelling to Colorado in January for a screening of a self-produced documentary detailing the story of his life, which included periods of being jailed and tortured as a political prisoner in the African countries of Ethiopia and Somalia.
While going through security at the James Richardson International Airport on his way to a U.S. departure gate, Saeed said he was pulled aside by officials with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA).
His hands were swabbed with a chemical and then he had to place his hands into a machine, he said.
He was then told traces of trinitrotoluene – or TNT, an explosive material — were found.
He said he had no idea why his hands set off alarm bells.
'Is it human error, is it the machine error or am I being labelled because I'm Islam name?'
—Ali Saeed"She said, 'you have got contact with explosive material — TNT,'" Saeed told CBC News. "I don't know what TNT means. Is it candy, is it sandwich? I don't know what this explosive material is."
Saeed said he was allowed to board his plane and his return flight home to Winnipeg was uneventful, but he is concerned because CATSA told him the information about the incident will be kept on file for future reference.
He worries the information could come back to haunt him because of his activist past and Islamic-sounding name.
"Is it human error, is it the machine error, or am I being labelled because [of my] Islam name?" he wonders.
Policy not followed
In a letter to Saeed, CATSA apologized and admitted that officials at the airport broke protocol by telling him about their findings.
"CATSA's procedures stipulate that screening officers must not discuss an … alarm with passengers," the letter said.
"We are sorry that this is not what occurred. We extend our sincere apologies for the screening officers' actions and the stress it caused you."
On Tuesday, an agency spokesperson told CBC News that Saeed will not have any trouble travelling in the future, and will send him a letter telling him so.
In December, Saeed was awarded the 2009 Human Rights Commitment Award of Manitoba by the Manitoba and Canadian Human Rights Commissions for his work in sponsoring refugees from Ethiopia.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2010/02/17/human-rights-activist-winnipeg-airport.html#ixzz0gZhiR5Tc
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