[lbo-talk] Whitewash on the Dark Continent (John Dolan bookreview)

[Joseph Wanzala]

or better yes, if you can find a copy, Chinweizu's "The West and the Rest of 
Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883570157/102-5209214-2992952?v=glance&n=283155

http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/15846.html

CHINWEIZU (1943-), Nigerian poet and critic. Born in Eluama-Isuikwato in 
eastern Nigeria, Chinweizu studied mathematics and philosophy at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and American studies and history at 
the State University of New York, Buffalo before undertaking post-doctoral 
research in economics back at MIT. This background enabled him to carry out 
an interdisciplinary exploration of Africa's contemporary political, 
economic, and cultural condition, an exploration that centres with 
passionate intensity on the continent's despoliation by the West. Working as 
a journalist from the 1980s onwards for newspapers such as the Lagos 
Guardian and Vanguard, he sustained this primary focus of his work, often in 
the fiercely combative terms that have led him to be identified as Nigeria's 
most celebrated polemicist.

Chinweizu's first large-scale work, The West and the Rest of Us (1975), is a 
historical account of Western domination of the developing world, especially 
of Africa. An impressive work of synthesis, the book strongly critiques 
Africa's governing elites and argues for a dissolution of dominant 
Eurocentric values and a reconstruction of African society through the 
establishment of pan-African political and economic unity. Chinweizu's most 
influential work, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), is 
a compilation of a series of essays published in Okike in the 1970s and 
co-authored with Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. In this highly 
pre/proscriptive work Chinweizu and his colleagues effectively dissect the 
analytical weaknesses and prejudices of 'Eurocentric' critics of African 
literature. Chapters on African fiction and poetry distinguish categorically 
between writing the three authors condemn as being tied to Eurocentric 
models (the poetry of Wole Soyinka and the earlier Christopher Okigbo) and 
work they regard as authentically African. This part of the book is 
occasionally inspired, as with a section on oral storytelling techniques, 
but flounders badly when the authors' own analytical shortcomings are 
combined with a tedious and self-conscious belligerence, qualities that 
earned the three Soyinka's tag 'neo-Tarzanists'. Both Chinweizu's poetry, 
collected in Energy Crisis (1978) and Invocations and Admonitions (1986), 
and his stories, collected in The Footnote (1981), frequently reiterate his 
central theme, the destructive social and cultural transformations inflicted 
on Africa by the West. The essay collection Decolonising the African Mind 
(1987), despite its displays of entrenched prejudice, including an extremely 
offensive diatribe against Soyinka, contains some astringent analysis of 
Africa's economic malaise. Anatomy of Female Power (1990) inverts 
progressive recognitions of women's oppression under patriarchy, identifying 
women as tyrants over men; in so doing, ironically, Chinweizu quotes 
reactionary Western commentators with full approval.



>From: "Joseph Wanzala" <jwanzala at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Whitewash on the Dark Continent (John Dolan 
>bookreview)
>Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 09:22:36 -0800
>
>as an antidote, may I suggest Howard French's A Continent for the Taking : 
>The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.
>
>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414614/102-5209214-2992952?v=glance&n=283155
>
>"For the U.S., Africa is only a source for oil and other resources and a 
>theater of misery, according to senior New York Times writer French, who 
>reported on Central and West Africa in the 1990s. In contrast to that 
>official detachment is French's own passionate engagement, both with what 
>he sees close-up and with the politics and history. An African American 
>raised in Washington, D.C., he has lived with his family in Africa, and he 
>brings a unique perspective to the news in Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and 
>Congo. He is as critical of the corruption and greed of Africa's modern 
>leaders as he is of the West, but he does blame much of the continent's 
>trouble on colonialism and "faraway mapmakers" who patched countries 
>together. Most damning is his criticism of the Clinton administration's 
>preoccupation with the Bosnian crisis, while it ignored the much bigger 
>Rwandan genocide and its aftermath. French's eyewitness reporting is 
>unforgettable, as in the portrait of a Liberian child-soldier. The "hope" 
>of the subtitle isn't here. Hazel Rochman
>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved"
>
>
>>From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
>>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>>Subject: [lbo-talk] Whitewash on the Dark Continent (John Dolan book 
>>review)
>>Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 08:57:18 -0800 (PST)
>>
>>The eXile 44 Feb 06
>>Whitewash on the Dark Continent
>>By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )
>>
>>"The State of Africa A History of Fifty Years of
>>Independence"-by Martin Meredith London 2005
>>
>>See it on Amazon.com...
>>
>>You Russians will instantly recognize the thesis of
>>Martin Meredith's book. It's simple: turns out
>>Africa's problems are the fault of:the Africans. Just
>>like all Russia's problems in the late 1990s turned
>>out to be all your own fault, after you had the
>>effrontery not to transform yourselves into
>>Republicans as quickly as Yeltsin's imported con men
>>and thieves, exemplified by that erudite thief and con
>>man Anders Aslund, had exhorted you to do.
>
>
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