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.
>
>
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk