fredag 28 december 2012

There is nothing called an African culture.

I used to hear people in Sweden saying “I am going to Africa” or “I am attending a course in an African dance”, etc. A continent of 55 countries easily clustered together to a single entity.


The variety of this continent is remarkable. Africa is a continent of great contrast and diversity. Its vast size is more than three times the land area of the continental United States. The democratic republic of Congo alone is as big as the entire Western Europe.

The languages spoken on the continent are perhaps as many as a thousand, which are as distinct as English is from German (Martin and O´Meara:1995:13).

I wonder why grove generalizations are always made concerning the African continent despite the amazing diversity. The impact of colonialism and slavery in perpetuating racially based bizarre ideologies towards black people is enormous and is still felt in every corner of the planet.

“The invention and reinvention of Africa and Africans” by Europe and “The scramble for Africa” are still continuing unabated though in a different form now compare to the colonial era.

The very origin of calling the cradle of humanity - the African continent: “The darkest and most exotic continent” by Europeans, has to do with their inferiority complex and need to justify their “civilizing missions”in the 18th century. Everything was allowed in the rampancy of ignorance and arrogance.

Even now when we are supposed to be “enlightened” and “inter-connected” with all sorts of social media, people continue to have the same prejudice as before. Using zoological and derogatory terminologies regarding black folks is a quite “normal” phenomenon. These negative connotations do not even engender any reaction from the public anymore.

The term “ethnic” is a creation of colonialism along with “tribes”. One can ask why the same terminologies are not applied on people of European origins. This is the question Antoine Lema raises in his book Africa Divided – The creation of “Ethnic Groups” (1993).

It is beyond any doubt that ethnic groups, as a form of static and dogmatic markers of identity, have not always existed in sub-Saharan Africa. Lema (Ibid) questions why sixteen million Igbo in Biafra, Nigeria and sixty million Hausa in Northern Nigeria are called tribes and ethnic groups and not nations in terms of peoples or socio-cultural groups.

While the Austrian people, the Swedish people and the Danish people under the same period and with populations that are less than ten million are called nations. For Lema, it is obvious that some process of ethnic marking and ethnic management has taken place when it comes to the African population.

He further questions what an ethnic group is and how old ethnic groups are in Africa. Why European immigrants in Africa are never called ethnic groups, whereas Africans in their own continent are.

Colonialism has historically contributed immensely in the creation of ethnic identities through the policies of assimilation, division and sub-division, and on the bases of belonging to certain physical and socio-cultural features.

Aiden Campbell´s book ‘Western primitivism: African Ethnicity: A Study in Cultural Relations’ (1997) is a path breaking work in demystifying so-called “African tribalism” and “savagery primitivism”.

He argues that tribal barbarism from Africa tend to be employed by Western commentators with the intention of emphasizing humanity´s potential for evil, rather than solely laying stress upon African atavism.

The only logical conclusion that one can draw here for the sake of humanity is: There is nothing called an African culture or dance. There are distinct cultures and cosmologies within the continent but not a single entity that is the embodiment of Africa and Africans.



måndag 24 december 2012

Nigeria, we belive in...


Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe are just two of the many legendary writers from Nigeria. Soyinka and Achebe have written quite a lot of books and articles about subjects ranging from the colonial legacy to the “failure of Nigeria”.

 Being the largest country in the African continent with an estimated population of 150 millions and huge oil resources, Nigeria should have been the “success story” from the outset. 

The country has rather attracted the attention of the world for all bad and wrong reasons: the Biafra war in the 1960s, numerous military coups and dictatorship, tension between different groups that claim sectarian and religious affinity like Boko Haram, Niger Delta and so on. One wonders what has gone wrong with Nigeria with so much potential but nothing to show for it.

The monumental failure of Nigeria as a nation-state is beyond anyone´s doubt. The state has not lived up to its  missions of creating a climate of peace/security, prosperity, development, democracy, national identity by providing equal rights and opportunities for all citizens of the nation, no matter sex, ethnicity ,etc. The question is whether the state of Nigeria has ever had the will, ambition and aspiration to realize its full potential. I doubt it.

It is probably as the political scientist Claude Ake once wrote: it is not so much about failure because genuine democracy and development has never even been on the agenda at all. The resources of the state have been embezzled by most of the leaders after independence. The politics of the belly has been the order of the day. 

Corruption has also been endemic in all sectors of the Nigerian society. A country that is so rich in oil resources continues to import refined oil from other countries despite the millions of barrels of crude oil that leaves Nigeria´s shore on a daily basis. 

The disenchantment and disfranchisement of the population has been exasperated even more by the lack of any fair distribution of wealth along the years. The sense of belonging on the basis of citizenship has never existed. People identify themselves first and foremost as Muslims, Christians, Igbos, Yorubas, and Hausas, etc. 

The current president with the funny name Good Luck Jonathan seems to be trying to consolidate the power of the state in order to provide basic human needs for its citizens. His wife is called patience and this fellow really needs all luck and patience on earth to finally change things in Nigeria for the better. I want to see a Nigeria that we all can believe in and look up to in the African Continent because South Africa is betraying humanity us as usual. 

 The Nigerian economy has started moving into the right direction and many exiled Nigerians are returning home as never before as they eventually see some lights in the tunnel. Boko Haram remains to be the greatest threat for now but widespread unemployment and poverty are the most dangerous ones not only for Nigeria but for the whole world.   

måndag 17 december 2012

Revolution united

I saw a documentary called  "Revolution united" on Aljazeera the other day. It was  about the Japanese “Red Army”. Japanese young men and women had joined the front for the liberation of Palestine and gone to Israel where they participated in the bombing of an airplane in 1972.


27 people died in this action and two Japanese Red Army members are among the dead. A third one was captured alive and sentenced to a long time jail sentence in Israel. He was eventually freed in an exchange of prisoners between the front for the liberation of Palestine and Israel. He still lives in the Middle East in Lebanon where he is seen as a national hero.

Another Japanese citizen who was among the original founders of the group was sentenced to 26 years imprisonment for her alleged involvement of an attack on French embassy in Holland in the early 1970s. Many other Japanese citizens were also handed long jail sentences for having stayed in Lebanon “illegally”.

I wonder what drove people from the Far East to join the Palestine cause. Many other nationalities have also fought for causes that are not of their immediate concerns. These individuals that transcend their own self-cantered, local, national, cultural and other boundaries are mesmerizing.

The Japanese group started organizing themselves first against the increasing union fee at their university. They were also demonstrating against the involvement of “an Imperialist Japan” in indo-china and its support for the USA in the Vietnam War.

Making local issues into a national one is a grand task in itself but going from a local student issue to an internationalism of Palestine liberation is a different matter. It is always regrettable when civilian lives are taken in the name of “a revolution” or “radical change” but resurrection to violence and revolutionary movements seems to be very characterizing of the 1970s. The military coup in Chile in 1973, the Ethiopian revolution that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and the Iranian revolution of 1979 are just some examples of that remarkable decade when I was supposed to have been brought to this world.

Terrorism is probably the term that has been used extensively to explain all sorts of “violent resistance” these days. The sad association of Islam with that term shows how media always selects to focus on violence that erupts from other regions and religions than the occident.

The memories of radical groups from Germany and Japan from the 1970s may have been blurred but barely forgotten. Historical conditioning is perhaps in favour of those who hold the economic and political power in the world but the very creation of the state of Israel is the product of “terrorism” too. So it is a question of definition about what constitutes terrorism and who commits it.

I have always felt that an individual can make a difference in peoples lives whether a positive or a negative one. I do not like though feeling guilty for doing too little to bring about a change in the right direction in the fight against poverty, insecurity and injustice in the world. I am not guilty of being a critical citizen of the world. I am not an innocent anthropologist either. I am just a bewildered man who keeps wondering and questioning……………..

måndag 10 december 2012

Swedish neutrality literally means Swedish hypocrisy

I do not understand what it means to be “a neutral country” as Sweden claims to be. There is nothing called “neutrality” in my vocabulary because human relationships are based on “subjectivity” and not “objectivity” as many baldly claim. You are either for racism/Nazism or against it. How could one stand by and look indifferently when the world around you is falling apart as never before. There is no any middle way here. You should take a side on issues like this and fight against it wherever the bell for freedom rings.

Swedish history is full of indifference and hypocrisy. Sweden managed to avoid a direct involvement both in the first and second world war. The country might not have been involved in colonialism and slave trade directly but did of course benefit from that inhuman treatment of coloured people. God knows the number of people who perished because of colonialism and slavery but a moderate estimation is 50 million. This is tantamount to genocide.

500 years of western domination across the world has cost the lives of 500 million people. 10 million in Congo alone! No western leader has yet faced trial for these crimes against humanity. Impunity is their trademark as they control the” international criminal court”.

Sweden allowed Nazi German soldiers to go through its territory on the way to Norway during the Second World War. It also deported a number of refugees from the Baltic States to the despotic Soviet Union after the war. Individual Swedes took their own initiatives and fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union alongside fellow Danish, Norwegian and Finnish people.

The Swedish state/government was passive for most of the last century and never stood up against genocide/holocaust/extermination/pogrom. It was first during the 1960s when Olof Palme became the prime minister that he put Sweden on the international map after condemning the USA for its barbaric war in Vietnam. This single incident though can not make Sweden a self-gratifying “moral superpower” as it wrongly is perceived.

Sweden still keeps hundreds of refugees in custody for months and in some cases up to a year before deportation. It deported two Egyptians to Egypt a decade ago. The two guys were arrested upon arrival in Cairo, tortured and imprisoned for years. The then Swedish government of Göran Persson “was promised” by the dictator Hosni Mubarak that nothing was going to happen the two guys. You might call this blunder a blue-eyed naivety of unmatched magnitude but Sweden has not got the guts to tell Africans what is best for them as long as it keeps its double standards on course. The track record of western countries on human rights violations speaks for itself and does not call a genius mind to grasp the fallacy here. Guantanamo, Abu Ghrabi and Bahram are just a few examples of “the global age” under the banner of “restoring hope” or “imposing universal values of human rights and democracy”.

The west in general and Sweden in particular needs to set its house in order first before imposing the Swedish/western values of complacency, neutrality and indifference on other folks. Universal universalism is not euro-centric universalism which emphasizes the values of decadence, aggression, inferiority/superiority complex and impunity. We need the respect for human rights and the rule of law and democracy that accommodates everyone in Sweden as much as in many  other parts of the world.