In this keynote lecture delivered at the annual conference of the Stanford Forum for African Studies in Palo Alto, California, on 29 October Pius Adesanmi explores how capitalism has organised human history and experience in the pursuit of profit. The full lecture is available here.

In this interview with , Pius Adesanmi speaks about the role of academia, politics, aid, football and his new book, ‘You are Not a Country, Africa’, the inaugural winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing.

As he explores the general sense of euphoria to have greeted Barack Obama’s election victory in cities around the African continent, Pius Adesanmi considers the significance of the possessive ‘we’ commonly employed in African citizens’ descriptions of the new US president-elect. Deeply constrained by the expectations of some of the less level-headed parts of the US electorate, Obama’s potential pro-Africa posturing may well be limited by the need to remain palatable to the American populace. But if effectively harnessed, the author argues, Obama’s ascendancy represents a genuine opportunity for Africa’s community of conscience to fundamentally redress the anti-humanity, pro-resources plundering of the continent to have characterised Western countries’ and African leaders’ approach over the past five hundred years.

The timeline of black agency has been determined to a great extent in the last six centuries by the need to overcome man-made historical impediments, notably slavery, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism – and their new forms in the present – on the one hand, and the necessity to validate the black world's contributions to what black luminaries like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor have described as the "civilization de l'universel" on the other hand. This imperative of rehabilitating the black subject and relocating her within what Sylvia Wynter calls the sign of "Man" has taken such diverse routes as Indigénisme, the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Négritude, the Civil Rights movement, decolonization, liberation struggles/wars, and the anti-apartheid struggle. While some of these routes of black agency were largely discursive, some were praxilic, and some others were a combination of discourse and praxis. What united them was their overarching force of interpellation across global black communities. They were all grands récits that transcended their own immediate contexts of articulation to become transnational sites of black self-fashioning through a strategy based largely on the creation of an imagined community of black memory.

Pius Adesamni looks at the recent Raila Odinga visit with Obasanjo and argues that African ruling classes are so prodigious in the production of political farce that all one needs to do is read African newspapers for absurd realities that no African writer has as yet to match.

Give it to politicians, the military, and other professional hijackers of the state in Africa! They are able to squeeze the juice of comedy out of the stone of unspeakable tragedies they routinely visit on their people and the continent. The most unfortunate victim of the inexhaustible creativity of the African political class, their cynical mastery of the resources of the proscenium, is African fiction. The political class in Africa constitutes the most potent threat to the health of African literature. Simply put, our politicians are driving our writers out of business.

Why do I need to spend my hard-earned money on Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood when Raila Odinga and Mwai Kibaki have manufactured realities in Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiongo’o’s brilliant imagination simply cannot match? All I need is regular internet access to Kenyan newspapers to avail myself of a direct taste of Kenya according to her politicians.

Why do I need Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and T.M. Aluko’s One Man, One Matchet in my seminar room when the blood and flesh versions of Chief Nanga and Benjamin Benjamin in Abuja have turned Achebe and Aluko into dwarves in the business of fiction? The Nigerian ruling class is so prodigious in the production of political farce that all I need do is read Nigerian newspapers for quotidian realities that no Nigerian writer has the imagination to match.

That African politicians are constantly and permanently ahead of hapless African writers was brought home by two recent events. Ogaga Ifowodo, one of Nigeria’s best poets, wrote an essay in which he imagined a meeting between Mwai Kibaki and Umaru Yar’Adua. What did Yar’Adua tell Kibaki, Ifowodo asked? To create his hypothetical situation, Ifowodo deployed the full arsenal of his trade: sarcasm, hyperbole, allusions, and the like. At the end of the essay, Ifowodo was sure he had delivered his message effectively and unambiguously: the Nigerian presidency is so diseased, so morally compromised, that the possibility of the Nigerian government having a say in the Kenyan debacle can only exist in the realms of fiction and the most outrageous imagination. Given the rotten political pedigree of the people in charge in Abuja, Nigeria’s involvement was so improbable that Ifowodo treated it as fiction, something better left as material for the exclusive use of the African writer.

As is sadly often the case in Africa, Odinga, the politician, was miles ahead of Ifowodo, the writer. Odinga did not wait for Ifowodo’s ink to dry before hopping on a flight to Nigeria last week. His mission? Wait for it: to consult with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria’s immediate past president) and persuade him to convince Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua, current president and Obasanjo’s puppet, that it was time Nigeria got involved in fashioning an African solution to Kenya’s political impasse! It has taken Ogaga Ifowodo more than twenty years of sustained production of brilliant poetry to establish his reputation as one of Africa’s leading users of the imagination. Raila Odinga and his Nigerian hosts have eclipsed this record in a couple of hours.

When I read about Odinga’s trip to Nigeria, I had a tough choice between laughing and crying. I settled for the former. To grasp the tragedy in all its unpleasant ramifications, one has to unpack Odinga’s company in Nigeria: Obasanjo and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) machinery. Of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the least said the better. Writing about Obasanjo here would turn this piece into an exposé on unbridled corruption and the defoliation of Nigeria’s destiny in two tragic installments: 1976 – 1979, and 1999 – 2007. Whenever tails are mentioned in a discussion, the toad hurriedly suggests changing the topic and moving on to other issues! So, let’s leave Obasanjo and move on to Yar’Adua and the PDP.

History’s final verdict on African political parties would be hard pressed not to record the PDP as the most vicious, most corrupt, and most visionless political organization ever to bestride the Nigerian – and African political landscape. It would be sheer travesty of justice if the National Party of Henrik Verwoerd and Pieter Botha fared worse than Nigeria’s PDP in the reckoning of history. Ever since its unfortunate formation, the PDP has been home to the worst elements of Nigerian humanity. Although it loves to delude itself as Africa’s largest political party, the truth is that the PDP is Africa’s largest assembly of funny characters with zero moral capital. Excellence in political thuggery, treasury looting, and election rigging are key attributes of membership and upward mobility in party ranks. It is significant that in a supposedly democratic dispensation, the PDP has surpassed Sani Abacha’s record of unresolved political assassinations. The rate of intra-party assassinations became so breathtaking at a point that the inimitable Wole Soyinka baptized the PDP as a “nest of killers”. Soyinka forgot to add that the PDP is also a lair of Africa’s most gifted thieves. To go through the list of party leaders – Party Chieftains in Nigerian parlance – is to be in stark contemplation of the tragedy of modern Nigeria: Olusegun Obasanjo (self-appointed Father of modern Nigeria), Olabode George, Ahmadu Ali, Lamidi Adedibu (stark illiterate, recently designated Father of the PDP!), Andy Uba, Chris Uba, and thousands of other birds of similar feather, looting the state dry in rigged political positions.

That these low-quality characters and their scions have hijacked the Nigerian state is a precise indication of the abysmally low depths to which Nigeria has fallen. Among the many sins of this dishonorable cabal and their dishonorable party, the 2007 election pretty much takes the cake. Nigerians are in agreement with the international community that the PDP’s 2007 electoral heist ranks among the worst in human history. It is unnecessary to rehash the details here. Suffice it to assert that Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s current president, is the morally compromised custodian of a purloined mandate who has been unable to rise above the debased values of his cabal and do the right thing. Rather, he has ignored the festering leprosy his diseased party has foisted on Nigeria while hypocritically making a show of his determination to cure negligible ringworm infections.

This is a snapshot of the kind of company Raila Odinga went to keep in Nigeria. The story of Nigeria’s sorry pass in the gangrened grip of the PDP cartel is globally ubiquitous: not even a blind and deaf kindergarten pupil in Siberia can claim ignorance of the Nigerian situation. What part of this narrative did Raila Odinga not understand? The ways of the African politician are truly perplexing! How did Raila Odinga arrive at the conclusion that Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua and his PDP government, morally compromised perpetrators of the worst electoral heist in human history, are in any position to advise him on the way forward in Kenya? How did he determine that Nigeria’s forty thieves deserve a place at the table of serious African conversations on credible elections, good governance, and democracy? Who are Odinga’s handlers in Kenya? How could all of them have missed the fact that the people he was going to consult in Nigeria practice a version of democracy that consists in assassinating your opponent or rigging your way to political office? Do we need to translate “nest of killers” to Swahili before Mwalimu Odinga can understand that simple expression? By going to consult the worst Nigeria has to offer, Odinga has spat on the graves of the Kenyans who have lost their lives so far and added to our frustration and helplessness as ordinary Nigerians.

Nigerians are in a particularly sensitive phase of their national life. We are a beautiful country of beautiful people who have had the extraordinary misfortune of being held hostage by the worst among us. Although we once contributed exemplary characters to Africa’s leadership pool during the nationalist and immediate post-nationalist eras, we have never known democracy in any real sense. The closest we came to it was on June 12, 1993 when ‘we, the people’ voted in the only free and fair election we have ever known. Our hopes and aspirations were quashed by the same vicious enemy-cabal that aborted our dreams of post-independence nationhood and have held us hostage ever since. Sometimes, this cabal comes in army fatigues; sometimes it wears flowing civilian robes but it is the same rotten organism that perpetually recycles itself. When people who should know better invite the worst we have to offer to the table, the wound cuts deep in the Nigerian psyche. It reminds us painfully of Frostian roads not taken. And in this case, we are much more certain than Frost of what could have been had the right people taken the roads not taken.

It bears repeating: the Nigerian state, currently held hostage by a dishonorable cabal and a bloodthirsty, kleptocratic political party, does not qualify to be consulted or invited to the table when good governance and credible elections in Africa are in the agenda. If Raila Odinga was so desperate for Nigerian advice, all he needed do was ask and we would have supplied him names of Nigerians who qualify to be at the table. Nigeria has more that a hundred million names that could have given Odinga advice from an eminently moral high ground since members of the dishonorable enemy-cabal are, thankfully, in the minority and in no way represent what we have to offer as a people. If Odinga had consulted serious people before embarking on his worthless trip to Nigeria, one would have given him such meritorious names as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Gani Fawehinmi, Patrick Utomi, Edwin Madunagu, Odia Ofeimun, Okey Ndibe, Omoyele Sowore, just to mention a few. These are among our very best, the kinds of people who still make it possible for Nigerians to defy the rape of their humanity by the jokers in the PDP and identify proudly with their nation.

If, however, Mwalimu Odinga insists on getting his advice on how to move Kenya forward from discredited African sources, we can also help him. Let him return to Nigeria and consult with all the corrupt PDP governors currently facing embezzlement charges. On his way back home, he may want to stop over in Libreville and Yaounde for consultations on credible democracy with Omar Bongo and Paul Biya. A stopover with Eugene Terreblanche in South Africa will spice up things nicely. He may then return to Nairobi and tell Kofi Annan that he has received superior advice from more credible sons of Africa!

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post where this article first appeared. He has contributed to Counterpunch, Slepton and Chimurenga online.

** Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org This article first appeared at The Zeleza Post.

My good friend, Moses Ochonu, a Professor of African History at Vanderbilt, once penned an essay about the frustrations of offering balanced and optimistic perspectives on the Nigerian condition, even in the context of "considerably lowered" expectations. Prior to a trip to Nigeria, Ochonu had taken the precaution of fortifying his psyche against the trauma of disappointment by lowering his expectations in line with what he deemed would be the quality of the social contract between a tragically atrophied postcolony and her citizens. He tried not to expect good roads; he tried not to expect stable power supply; he tried not to expect water from the taps; he tried not to expect safety of life and property; he tried not to expect smooth delivery of any of those routine services the state renders to the citizen; he tried not to expect courtesy from public officials; he tried not to expect people not to demand bribe. In essence, he prepared himself mentally for a trip to, well maybe not exactly hell, but to the famed threshold between earth and hell in Yoruba mythology. Although not quite in hell, the inhabitants of this liminal zone are sufficiently close to feel the heat as we see in some of the novels of D. O. Fagunwa. To protect himself, Ochonu placed the bar of expectation so low as to bury it in the sand. Yet, Nigeria managed to burrow deep into Ochonu's sand, find that buried bar of expectation, and settle down comfortably below it. In the light of this situation, my friend agonized over the dilemma of teaching Africa positively in the North American classroom when quotidian details keep pulling the rug off the feet of even the most unrepentant Afro-optimist.

A few days after I read Ochonu's piece, pondering how brilliantly it mirrors my own experience, another colleague, a Francophone African national, phoned from the US. As he had just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, we talked Africa. He had not read Ochonu's piece but what he had to say revealed an extraordinary convergence of opinions between him and Ochonu. He told me he'd perfected a "mental survival kit" for traveling in Africa. He watches the screened flight indicator very closely in the plane. Once he notices that the plane has entered the airspace of the African continent, he takes off what he calls his "toga of Western standards" and wears his danshiki of considerably diminished expectations. That way, he's never disappointed. On the contrary, he is even pleasantly surprised whenever things work. That's the only way this seasoned Afro-optimist maintains his sanity when crisscrossing the continent.

The normalization of the substandard in Africa, its osmotic seepage into the weft of continental modes of being, can sometimes provide material for Nobel-class comedy. Accused of organizing the worst election in human history, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's immediate past president and current national joke, lashed out at the international community for criticizing an election that satisfied African standards! How can rational people expect an African election to measure up to international standards, Obasanjo fumed. His opinion was promptly supported by Lady Lynda Chalker, the talkative British leech who always arranges to be in the company of the most reactionary elements within the ruling cabal in Nigeria. The elections were indeed very successful by Nigerian and African standards, she crooned. Our humiliation was complete. Bless her soul! The old lady wasn't to blame. Our leaders delivered the mouth with which to abuse us to her on a platter of gold. I once took a taxi from Lomé to Kpalimé in Togo. It was a standard Peugeot 505 car meant for a driver and four passengers. As is customary in so many parts of the continent, the driver squeezed two passengers in front and sardined four in the back for a total of seven people in a car meant for five. When I drew attention to this, the driver laughed heartily and gave me a paternal response: "ca c'est pour les blancs" (those standards are for white people).

Nowhere is this production of comedy out of monumental tragedy more palpable than in the impatience with which Africa's seems to replace one negative international headline with another. Darfur supplied endless materials for international headlines and gave value, sense, and meaning to the lives of Western actors operating in what I've called the Mercy Industrial Complex. While Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Bono were still shedding darfurized tears for international cameras, a jealous Zimbabwe drove Darfur out of the headlines. For a while, it looked like Zimbabwe was going to stay the course and spend some respectable time in the headlines but Nigeria had other ideas. Nigeria drove Zimbabwe out of international headlines with the joke she called elections in April 2007. As the giant of Africa, one would have expected other African countries to be deferential and allow Nigeria sufficient time in the sun but Kenya had other ideas. Kenya drove Nigeria out of the headlines with even worse elections, effectively confirming the seminal thesis of Professors Olusegun Obasanjo and Lynda Chalker on African elections. Before Nigerians could recover from the Kenyan affront, the shock of coming to terms with the fact that it is possible for any African country to offer a worse election scenario than Nigeria, South Africa drove Kenya out of the headlines with news of sporadic power cuts! News of power outage and rationing in South Africa got less than two weeks in the international headlines before our impatient friends in Chad drove South Africa out of the headlines. As I write, rebels have shot their way into the capital, displacing people and creating another potential refugee crisis. By now, the jet engines should be revving to move the Mercy Industrial Complex to N'djamena until another African theatre of the absurd drives Chad out of the headlines.

As a scholar paid to research and teach Africa in the West, Africa's generous production of negative headlines presents the most daunting professional challenge. You are a student of Eurocentrism. You are a student of the production of Africa in Western imagination. You are familiar with the image of Africa in the Western media. You know the tropes and metaphors of "the Africa that never was", as the title of one famous book very aptly puts it. In scholarly circuits, you are familiar with the history and discursive trajectory of Afro-pessimism. In fact, you are part of the postcolonial, dissident, and dissentient response machine to Western traducers of our past and our present. You prepare graduate seminars aimed at teaching your students how to approach Africa objectively; how not to pathologize Africa as eternal negation; how not to reduce the continent to a theatre Hobbesian self-abasement among "natives" and "tribes"; how to sift through Western sensationalism in order to arrive at objective intellectual insights. You teach them to be critical. You don't want them to wax positive when the facts are negative just to butter up their African professor. You help them to establish connections between things by placing developments in Africa in the context of broader global situations and their implications.

You do this, hoping and praying that by the time they come back to class next week, Africa would not have supplied another round of headlines that could make a mess of the entire basis of your seminar. You are aware that intellectual objectivity imposes the recognition of the supply side of things on you. The Western media may sensationalize Darfur, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya but those countries supplied the material for sensationalization in the first place. Africa hardly ever disappoints. Every time they come to class, there is a fresh set of headlines to discuss briefly before class: they always google African news. "What's this thing about elections in Nigeria"? I try to give answers. "What do you make of the situation in Kenya"? I send them to The Zeleza Post to read analyses by Wandia Njoya and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. As you answer the questions, you are boiling within. But you are not mad at them. You are in fact very happy that they take your seminar and Africa sufficiently seriously to do that extra reading in African current affairs. Deep down, you know you are mad at Africa for the endless supply of the macabre. At times you feel so empty and drained that you begin to wonder if your self-imposed task of Afro-optimism makes you look like that funny character in the Yoruba folk tale who spends his/her life trying to fill a basket with water. That proverb, I guess, is the answer of the Yoruba people to the myth of Sisyphus. Every time you give an Afro-optimist lecture, the continent supplies new headlines to puncture your optimism but you keep on pouring water into that basket. Stubbornly. Your love story with Africa keeps you going. Love, hope, and faith convince you that you may one day fill that basket.

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org. This article first appeared at The Zeleza Post.

Pius Adesanmi comments on the Amakwerekwere syndrome - South Africa's xenophobia.

The letters came within two days of each other. The first was an invitation from Professor Georges Hérault, Director of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). Three years after my last visit to South Africa to assess the perception of Francophone African literatures in that country’s Universities, IFAS was again inviting me as visiting scholar. The second was from Chris Dunton, the well-known British Professor of African literatures who is now Chair of the English Department of the National University of Lesotho at Roma. Like Hérault, Dunton was inviting me to Lesotho as visiting scholar to present a Faculty of Arts Guest Lecture. I arranged a few other engagements and braced up for a very engaging psychic reconnection with the African continent.

I needed the return to Africa badly. I had been away from that continent for an uncomfortable stretch, carrying out my scholarly labor in the minefield of North American academe, writing Africa “from a rift”, as Achille Mbembe would put it. I also needed the trip for other reasons. I needed a reprieve from the oppression of the image: the North American media image of Africa. The African living here is in constant danger of accepting whatever image of Africa s/he is presented by the media as gospel truth. In North America, I have been consistently assailed, assaulted, and oppressed with images of Africa traceable to the colonial library: Africa-as-AIDS, Africa-as-hunger, Africa-as-civil war, Africa-as-corruption, Africa-as-the-antithesis-of-democracy, Africa-as-everything-we-are-glad-not-to-be. You get tired of the ritual of explaining to charmingly ignorant interlocutors that there is a fundamental distinction between the Africa they see on CNN and the real Africa.

I also wanted a break from Occidentalism. Fernando Coronil, the scholar who coined this term takes great pains to explain that it is not the reverse of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Coronil uses the newer concept to account for those discursive, usually innocuous processes through which the West turns difference into hierarchy and reproduces existing asymmetrical power relations. Occidentalism covers all the mundane quotidian events through which the West constantly reminds the immigrant of his otherness, strangeness, and difference:

“Oh, I love your accent. It’s awesome. Where is that from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria? You mean Nicaragua?”

This often-repeated, seemingly innocent “compliment” is usually the beginning of encounters that inevitably remind the immigrant that he does not belong… Departure date finally came around. “Be careful. Urban violence is rife in South Africa”, the Nigerian friends who drove me to the airport warned. I shrugged and dismissed their anxiety. There may be violence in South Africa; I certainly was not going to be scared of returning to Africa. I wasn’t going to be afraid of Black people in Africa. I arrived Johannesburg on a cold July morning. A delighted Georges Hérault was on hand at the airport to welcome me. We drove straight to the offices of IFAS located in the downtown area of Johannesburg. After signing my research contract papers and meeting some of the new members of the IFAS Research team, I announced to Hérault that I was going to take a stroll in the busy streets around IFAS. I was eager to get a feel of the same streets I had seen two years earlier. Hérault’s countenance changed. “Be careful. Don’t go out there with your wallet. You could get mugged.” I assured Hérault I would be all right but took the precaution of leaving my valuables in his office.

I started my walk, my reconnection with African soil, on the busy Bree street. For someone who had walked the same street three years earlier, I could not help but observe the heavy Black presence. Like the Hillbrow area, Blacks have taken over downtown Johannesburg. The official principle of separate development through which racial segregation was enforced under Apartheid seems to have been replaced by what one may call an unofficial principle of voluntary separation. While separate development instituted an order in which Blacks had to move out whenever Whites moved in, as was the case in Sophiatown, voluntary separation now induces Whites to move out quietly whenever and wherever Blacks move in. Downtown Johannesburg is a vivid example of a space in which this new South African drama is being played out. This space, which was still predominantly white during my earlier visit, has been taken over by Blacks. In large office complexes and shopping malls, one does not fail to notice the ubiquitous “To Let” signs, evidence of white retreat to other “safe” areas of the city like Rosebank or back “home” to Britain, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

I stopped for a light lunch at a KFC outlet, my mind busy taking in the new realities. I finished my lunch and went back into the street. I was about to cross a busy intersection when a street sign told me I was on Fox street. Fox street! I had heard a lot of terrifying things about that street since my last trip to South Africa. It is said to be one of the most violent streets in Johannesburg. One could get mugged or killed for as little as a hundred South African rands. I looked around me anxiously. I was surrounded by a sea of inscrutable Black faces. I touched my forehead and found out, much to my irritation, that I was perspiring profusely. It was winter in South Africa! And to my utter embarrassment, I discovered that I relaxed and felt safer each time white faces appeared in the crowd. Here was I, a Black man, looking anxiously for white faces to feel safe from Black violence in an African city! And to think that back in Canada, I had dismissed insinuations that I could be scared of “Black violence” in South Africa! I reluctantly came to the realization that I was far more affected by the oppression of the image than I had been willing to admit. The image of the post-apartheid Black condition in South Africa is constantly constructed in the Western media around the problem of violence. Such stereotypical and prejudicial narrativizations of Black South Africa always have two constantly-repeated, over-sensationalized buzzwords: mugging, robbery. That image had quietly slipped into my subconscious and was responsible for my feeling so uneasy amidst my own kind in a busy street in Johannesburg. I hurried back to IFAS.

On hearing that I had arrived in Johannesburg, Professor Harry Garuba came from his base in the University of Cape Town to spend a weekend with me. As Harry and I hadn’t seen each other since 1996, we had a riotously joyful reunion. The following day, we hit town. Harry wanted to see downtown Johannesburg. He also needed to go to the Consulate-General of Nigeria in Rosebank. As we meandered our way through the ever busy Bree street, Harry could not help observing how filthy downtown Johannesburg had become. I had made the same disturbing observation myself the day I arrived but had been reluctant to accept the disturbing fact that decay of public infrastructure seems to be the story in areas of the city inhabited by Blacks. Predominantly Black areas have become an eyesore. The beautiful lawns and flowerbeds I noticed in some areas three years earlier now tell sad stories of degradation. Some of them have become open-air urinals. Harry and I were worried. We tried to place ourselves in the shoes of White South Africans discussing the now filthy streets of Hillbrow and downtown Johannesburg: “Ah, the good old days of Apartheid!”

When Harry concluded his business at the Nigerian consulate, we took a bus and headed back to Georges Hérault’s residence. I still don’t know what it was about us that gave us away as foreigners but the other passengers, all Blacks, lapsed into an uneasy silence as soon as we entered. I looked at the faces around us and thought I saw hostility. The tension was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife. Harry confirmed my worst fears when we left the bus. I had just experienced, firsthand, South African xenophobia and I was to experience it again and again throughout my three-month sojourn in that country. Harry explained to me – with the coolness of someone used to it - that the Black South African passengers on the bus had identified us as makwerekwere, hence the naked hostility. Makwerekwere is the derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe non-South African blacks. It reminds one of how the ancient Greeks referred to foreigners whose language they did not understand as the Barbaroi. To the Black South African, makwerekwere refers to Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, especially Nigerians. I was confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid.

As I later discovered after a series of encounters, Black South Africans have found an easy explanation for the myriad problems of poverty, housing, transportation, unemployment, crime, violence, decay of public and social infrastructure. “Ah, the makwerekwere! These Nigerians are all criminals! When they are not busy trafficking drugs, they are taking over our jobs, our houses and, worse, our women. All foreigners must leave this country!” What Salman Rushdie refers to as a “demonizing process” of the Other is at work here and the consequences are predictably disastrous. There is so much anger and frustration among the Nigerians I met in South Africa. Most of them have become paranoid, living permanently in fear. In a discussion with some Nigerian medical doctors in Pretoria, I observed that their anger is directed more at Black South African leaders. “Imagine these South Africans treating us like this. They think Apartheid came to an end because they fought in Sharpeville and Soweto. It means Mandela never told them the truth. Mbeki never told them the truth.”

The doctors were referring to Nigeria’s heavy moral, political, and financial investment in the anti-Apartheid struggle. Nigeria’s financial and political commitment to that cause was total and unflinching. In the 1970s-80s, the South African freedom struggle was completely woven into Nigeria’s national imaginary, so much so that a Nigerian leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, suggested we mobilized “African juju” and other maraboutic forces of African sorcery to attack Pieter Botha and free our black brothers in South Africa. And he wasn’t joking. Every Nigerian musician, from reggae singers to fuji musicians in the Yoruba tradition, waxed radical anti-Apartheid lyrics to energize the 1970s – 1980s. “Who owns the land, who owns the land? We want to know who owns Papa’s land”, crooned Sonny Okosuns. Majek Fashek, the reggae man replied: “Now, now, now, Margaret Thatcher, free Mandela”! Victor Eshiet of The Mandators screamed: “Truth is our right, Jah is our might, we must free South Africa”.

Everywhere you turned in the Nigeria of those heady decades, freedom for Black South Africans was the dominant national agenda. Black South Africans, including President Thabo Mbeki and Ezekiel Mpahlele, found warmth, hospitality, and friendship during their years of exile in Nigeria. Many of Black South Africans attended Nigerian Universities on Nigerian scholarships. When it became clear that South African whites, like their European and American kinsmen, were determined to make peaceful change impossible and make violent change inevitable, Nigerians donated money to the armed struggle. Personally, I recall donating money during special anti-Apartheid fundraisers as a high school student in Nigeria. In view of this, the Nigerians I met in South Africa had only two words to describe the attitude of Black South Africans to them: collective amnesia.

Prejudice has been the force majeure of so much of human history. Our pantheon of small-minded hate is formidable: Christian prejudice manufactured the unbeliever; Islamic prejudice manufactured the infidel; heterosexual prejudice manufactured the faggot; patriarchal prejudice manufactured the hysteric; European prejudice manufactured the native; American prejudice manufactured the nigger; German prejudice manufactured the Jew; Israeli prejudice manufactured the Araboushim; Afrikaner prejudice manufactured the kaffir. Not to be outdone, Black South Africa has manufactured the makwerekwere as her unique post-Apartheid contribution to this gory pantheon. The joy of your instant-mix coffee (Nescafé) or your instant-mix powdered milk is the considerable labor and hassle it saves you. Just pour water, add sugar to taste, and your drink is ready. The makwerekwere is Black South Africa’s instant-mix kaffir, very easily produced with minimum labor.

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures ( at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post ( [email protected] or comment online at

The letters came within two days of each other. The first was an invitation from Professor Georges Hérault, Director of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS). Three years after my last visit to South Africa to assess the perception of Francophone African literatures in that country’s Universities, IFAS was again inviting me as visiting scholar. The second was from Chris Dunton, the well-known British Professor of African literatures who is now Chair of the English Department of the National University of Lesotho at Roma.

Pius Adesanmi puts Nicholas Sarkozy to task on France's foreign policy towards Africa

Dear President Sarkozy,

Happy new year. This is my second letter to you since you became the principal resident of the Elysée. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I wrote my first letter to congratulate you on your election to the presidency of France and to offer a few mots de sagesse on how to successfully negotiate the intricacies of your new station. Your actions since I wrote that letter are clear indications that you agreed with some of my propositions and disagreed with others. That’s fine. That’s the essence of democracy. You must be able to disagree with me on occasion. There are certain aspects of that first letter I now wish to renounce. I wrote that letter as an African patriot who knows the history, language, and culture of France very well and who hates the uses to which those things were put in places like Indochina, Algeria, Madagascar, and so many places where your people displayed unsurpassable brutality. I wrote as someone who hated the France that participated in slavery, the France that colonized, the France that civilized, the France that tortured, the hypocritical France that still despises “le Black” and “le Beur” while parading Thierry Henry and Zinedine Zidane as its finest gifts to humanity in recent times.

I hated this France until very recently. Now I’ve seen the light! Like Doc Gynéco, I’ve fallen in love with the France of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the France of Charles Pasqua, the France of you, my brother, Nicolas Sarkozy. I take back every negative thing I’ve said, written or thought about my beloved France. Those were my days of ignorance. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I have now washed myself clean of the blight of my uncivilized African origins. I no longer have any trace of the jungle left in me. I sleep and dream every day of my brand new Gallic ancestors. And as you know, I do not just speak French, I speak le Français de France, le Français du Français, le Français français just like brother Léon Damas of Guyana. You and I can now speak of our common heritage, our common history, our culture, and our civilization.

On the basis of our new, unimpeachable bond, I want to commend you for the valiant efforts you made to ensure that our compatriots, who were recently found guilty of child kidnapping and trafficking in Chad, were returned to us to serve their prison terms in Paris. It beats me that those uncivilized Africans would actually imagine that we would allow French criminals to serve jail time in Africa! Unimaginable. In N’Djamena of all places! Isn’t it insulting enough that dignified French criminals had to suffer the indignity of passing through an African judicial system and being treated like ordinary African criminals to boot? Imagine the emotional and psychological toll this treatment must have had on our criminals. I hope you will put pressure on the Chadian president to consider paying compensation to our criminals.

Really, these are times when I regret that we still haven’t found a proper replacement for my brother, the great Charles Foccart. There just will never be another Monsieur Afrique like him. He was a great man. He knew his Africa; he knew his Africans. They were like his children. When Charles Foccart handled Africa on behalf of La République, Africans were very well behaved children. Things would never have degenerated to a point where a whole Président de la République personally had to travel to Chad to secure the release of our criminals. One phone call from Foccart and Idriss Déby would have pissed in his pants. For more than three decades, Foccart raised and nurtured the boys who served us so well: Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Abdou Diouf, Paul Biya, Omar Bongo, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Mathieu Kérékou, Dennis Sassou Nguesso, Modibbo Kéita and so many others. Even Mobutu Sese Seko, who belonged to the Belgians, knew that his bread was buttered only when he recognized Foccart’s authority. Every family has a black sheep. Our black sheep in those days was Thomas Sankara who consistently misbehaved and reared his vegetable head on our path. Foccart arranged for him to be disciplined by Blaise Compaoré…

This brings me to my next point. In less than one year of your Presidency, you’ve visited Gabon, Senegal, Chad, and a few other places in Africa. In Senegal, you gave that great speech but Africans have reacted to it with characteristic ingratitude. No surprise here. They were never grateful for the civilization we took to them anyway. My point, however, is that you’re fraternizing too much and too frequently with Africans. It is one thing for us to make them happy by calling them partners in the Francophonie, it is another matter entirely if your behaviour begins to create the erroneous impression that the said partnership is, for us, anything more than the productive partnership between the horse and its rider. We must never forget that they are still subjects of our vast neocolony. Familiarity breeds contempt. We already have unpalatable consequences of your trips to Africa on our laps…

You have spent almost two precious decades of your public career waging a jihad against the immoral and amoral effects of the black and beur presence in our clean, pure, and intrinsically moral Aryan cities in France. You and I agree that every single problem of moral decadence and degeneracy one encounters in Paris, for instance, is attributable to the presence of those undesirable, hungry racaille from West Africa and the Maghreb. Just look at what they have turned neighbourhoods like Barbès and Belleville to! They are dirty, do not speak French, grow Islamic beards, wear Islamic foulard, marry too many wives, have too many concubines or “deuxieme bureau”, have too many children who drain our sécurité sociale. I’m not going to talk about your predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who complained, justifiably, about the “noise and odor” of these unwanted folks who invade our territoire national.

Of these undesirable attributes, polygamy, concubinage, and marital infidelity are the most alien to our pure, Christian, civilized Western culture. They are the most formidable indices of the primordial immorality of these people. This explains why your jihad against immigrants and sans-papiers has consisted in trying to demonstrate that they are just too steeped in their immoral and amoral cultures to be able to integrate fully into our civilized society. How does one expect a Malian or an Algerian not to have a harem of wives that makes a single family look like a football team? It’s their culture, not ours. How does one expect a Gabonese or a Togolese, who pretends to have only one wife, not to have a string of concubines scattered all over Paris? It’s their culture, not ours. How does one expect them not to cheat and lie? It’s their nature, not ours. The sacrosanct essence of marital vows, so fundamental in our culture, is completely alien to Africans and Arabs.

Given these incontrovertible facts, I’ve been trying to understand recent developments in your own life that are completely at odds with our culture. I am not talking about the much-publicized divorce between you and Cecilia. Divorce is the Siamese twin of marriage in our Western societies. The problem I have is with the time line of events. The mathematics is not working. No matter how one cuts it, slices it, spins it, the inevitable scenario is that you were seeing Carla Bruni – that stunning Italian model, your current girlfriend, and future Madame Sarkozy – long before you divorced Cecilia. Now, that looks awfully lot like you were cheating on Cecilia, lying to her. That looks awfully lot like you had a girlfriend or a concubine or a “deuxieme bureau”. At some point in this time line, you had a loose form of polygamy going on. Now, you have spent an entire career explaining to the world that such behaviour – the idea of polygamy, concubinage, deuxieme bureau, marital infidelity, etc – is alien to our pure Aryan culture and can be found only in the immoral and amoral cultures of folks from West Africa and the Maghreb. Do you see my problem now? Already, some mischievous African immigrants, who have resisted full cultural integration ferociously for a very long time, are now saying that if Sarkozy’s lifestyle is emblematic of Western culture, they won’t mind integrating at all! It seems to me that you are degrading our culture by making it look like the culture of Africans.

In my search for explanations, I have come up with a brilliant thesis. Since your degenerate behavior of rotating droits de cuissage (conjugal duties) between Cecilia and Carla is completely alien to our culture, you must have caught the virus during your frequent trips to Africa. I think you caught what Americans call jungle fever. Definitely, Africans are to blame for your behavior. Since you know their history so well – as your Dakar lecture reveals – you must know that the pages of our colonial library are littered with the ghosts of Europeans who ventured into the Dark Continent - the white man’s grave - and were physically and metaphorically eaten up. Those who did not die lost their minds and their souls to the degeneracy of Africa. Something about the environment, the mosquitoes, the heat, the humidity, and the incomprehensible roar of jungle drums destroys the moral compass of Europeans who venture into Africa. In your own case, you went to Africa, lost the purity of our culture, and came back a lying, quasi-polygamist, two-timing … (let’s leave the four words that would have followed to Americans).

I am trying to start an NGO in Paris. Our aim will be to sensitize our compatriots to these things and to ensure that no future President of France will ever set foot in Africa. The risks aren’t just worth the gains. This, I hope, will be my contribution to my new home, my new culture, my new society, and my new country: France!

Yours in Francophilia,

Pius Adesanmi

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures ( at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post ( www.projectponal.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/Pius-Adesanmi.jpgPius Adesanmi questions the omission of African feminists scholars from the Norton Anthology** and challenges the editors as to why “an entire continent is seen to have produced nothing of feminist theorizing “I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions.”

Dear Sandra and Susan, I salute you both in the name of feminism, women's liberation, gender equality, and, most importantly, global sisterhood. The publication of your much-anticipated Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader is such an epochal event that I must interrupt the blissful and well-deserved eternal sleep that was eventually accorded me when the people and government of France, ever so fatherly and motherly when it comes to taking care of poor Africa, graciously returned my brain and backside to the South African government for burial in my ancestral homeland a few years ago. I join the American and the global feminist family in congratulating the two of you on the publication of this truly wonderful volume. It is obvious that feminist intellectual labor will never ever be the same again. Resounding success, I must say, has become synonymous with the long history of intellectual collaboration between the two of you. Afterall, The Mad Woman in the Attic, the first gift of your collaborative efforts to humanity, has remained the only inevitable, unavoidable bible of feminist scholarship ever since it was published.

The reference to the magnanimity of France in returning my remains to the government and people of South Africa should have given my identity away by now. However, it is always safe and wise to swear by the natural invisibility of Africa and Africans in matters of global import. And in your immediate context in the United States, it is outright foolish to assume that anybody considers anything about Africa worth knowing. Except, of course, hunger, starvation, poverty, wars, AIDS, famine, and Western charity or "giving" (apologies to President Bill Clinton). I must therefore assume complete ignorance of my identity and introduce myself. I hope you will find it in your hearts to pardon my presumptuousness if you are both already familiar with my story.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/322/43548.jpgMy name is Sarah Baartman, also famously known internationally as "the Hottentot Venus". I will spare you the sassy details of my story and focus only on the essential. I was lured to London in 1810 where I soon became a prisoner of Europe's rapacious and capitalistic voyeurism. I'm sure I don't have to tell you the story of 19 th century Europe and its treatment of its Others in Africa and other places. No doubt, you still remember your Orientalism - Edward Said has been a very good friend since he got here. The Europe of this period was also a formidable theatre of all kinds of exhibitions.

Zoophilism was in the air. The colored Other needed to be displayed publicly and regularly in London, Paris, and Lisbon as colonial fauna.
As fate always manages to arrange these things, I was what Europeans called – and still call- an "African tribeswoman" gifted with an exceptional backside. Europe's science promptly concluded that my buttocks suffered from a biological deformity known as steatopygia.

The lips of my womanhood were also considered to be too huge and elongated for the civilized global standards determined by the labia of white women. And so from Britain to France my backside and the lips of my womanhood became objects of visual consumption in the public spheres of White patriarchy. For an extra fee, White men could even touch my behind while I was on display.

Death eventually came calling. You must know that where I come from in Africa, death is no finality. I merely transitioned to ancestor hood in the worldview of my people, hence the reverence with which Africans treat the dead. Not so Europeans. They took their knives and carving objects, carved out my brain, the lips of my womanhood, and my backside, put them in bottles, and kept them in public display at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Yes, I can see you cringe. You should. All sensitive feminists should. The idea, just the idea! The bitter tragedy of a woman's most vital parts captured by men, carved out of her dead body by men, and stored in the Museum of Man! Of all places!

My parts remained in public view in that museum, ultimate evidence of patriarchy's victory over feminism, until 1974 when they were withdrawn into a private sanctuary. Finally in 2002, France returned her precious conquest to the people of South Africa.

Dear sisters, the significance of my story to the feminist cause and to global feminist intellectual labor should be quite obvious by now.
For nearly two centuries, I was an international feminist cause célèbre, the very embodiment of patriarchal control over African female sexuality, black female sexuality, and, I daresay, female sexuality. Let me be clear: the story of my body in the international economy of meaning is the story of your own bodies, the story of every woman's body. The difference lies merely in the detail or what your postmodernist colleagues would call local particularities.

Given the fact that my narrative has become one of the most formidable sites – I hate it when I sound like you academics! – of global feminist contestation and intellection, it stands to reason that any reasonable person would expect me to make a grand, celebrated entrance into your Norton volume through the work of any of the numerous African feminist scholars of international repute who have written about me. At the risk of sounding immodest, nobody would expect to pick up a summation of five centuries of feminist intellectual labor – which your Norton anthology represents - and draw a blank with regard to the story of Sarah Baartman. After all, I've been theorized, postcolonized, and postmodernized in all the faddish versions of feminisms out there. I didn't think it was possible for me to be disappeared in any serious historiographical account of feminist theory. I didn't expect to be Ralph Ellisoned.

Trust me my dear sisters, I was not motivated to write you by any narcissistic self-indulgence. You will admit, from what you now know of my story, that I am quite used to being silenced, being disappeared. I am actually more worried by the broader, deeper ideological implications of your having disappeared me softly from your Norton volume. I am interested in the stories told – or untold – by your editorial choices and options, the instinct to include and the impulse to exclude. I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions. I know we are on the same page here.

Some people may praise you for making this volume truly global and representative by including the multi-layered voices of the Other.
They would be right if they did that. After all, you included essays by bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, evidence of your awareness of Africana feminist voices and practices; you included essays by Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty, evidence of your awareness of the expansive field of Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist voices and practices; the entry by Paula Gunn Allen saved the day for Native American feminisms; Gloria Anzaldua – another good friend of mine here – thankfully guarantees the presence of Chicana feminisms in your volume. In essence, the presence of these Other voices, strategically sprinkled in the text, is a laudable proof of the fact that you paid attention when Hazel Carby screamed in an article: "White Woman Listen"! You listened. You agreed with her that feminism could and should no longer be the gospel of the White western female according to Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Elaine Showalter and others too numerous to mention. You agreed with Carby that the narratives of the French delegation – Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva – should no longer be deemed universal. You agreed that Chinese women are probably better positioned to speak for and about themselves than be represented and spoken for by Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women.

It is your awareness of these things that makes your excision of African feminist theories and theorists from your volume all the more alarming. Could it be that you imagined that the voices of the African American women you selected adequately speaks for those of their continental sisters? Possibly. If this is the case, I must tell you that African American women cannot be made to stand in and speak for continental African women. According to an African proverb, the monkey and the gorilla may claim oneness, monkey is monkey and gorilla gorilla. Perhaps you imagined that African women would be better served to find some space inside the Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist umbrella you represented with the voices of Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty? Possibly. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the considerable body of African feminist intellection, right there in your back of the wood in the US academy? Possibly. Could it be that you just simply elected to disappear them like you disappeared me? Possibly.

I'm sure you know that Bill O'Reilly, the famous rightwing fundamentalist talkative on Fox News – has only just discovered in 2007 that African Americans are capable of eating properly with fork and knife, you know, like real, normal people. Now, I don't want you to travel that path. I don't want you to discover, in 2007, that continental African women have been theorizing feminism for a very long time in US academe and have produced a considerable body of work, one or two of which should deservedly have passed through the eye of Norton's needle. Since you included work by Alice Walker, I take it that you both know how well her theory of "womanism" has traveled in US and global women studies programs and departments. Trouble is, in 1985, before Walker used the term, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, a US-based Nigerian feminist scholar, had published an essay in Signs entitled: "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English". Now, Signs is not a journal the two of you could have missed. It's the most prestigious peer reviewed journal of feminist studies in the United States. But let's assume you somehow missed it, Ogunyemi subsequently published a very important book, African Wo/Man Palava, with the University of Chicago press in 1996.

Did you also miss that? We're talking U of Chicago Press for God's sake!

There is also Obioma Nnaemeka, a formidable feminist theorist based in Indiana University. Her reputation is global. Secure. Frankly speaking, her essay, "Feminism, Rebellious Women, and Cultural Boundaries" has no business not making your Norton Reader. There is of course her formidable work on female circumcision in Africa. By the way, isn't female circumcision in Africa – genital mutilation in Western parlance – supposed to be a subject of sensational predilection for western feminists and NGOs? If not a single excerpt from Obioma Nnaemeka's edited volume, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, made it into your volume, don't you think that something is awfully wrong?

There is also Oyeronke Oyewumi, an important US-based feminist theorist. The University of Minnesota Press published her book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, to critical acclaim in 1997. Not even a chapter in this book is worthy of inclusion? There is also Ifi Amadiume. She teaches at Dartmouth. Her Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender in an African Society is a priceless classic. Did you also miss that? There are Molara Ogundipe and Nkiru Nzegwu. How about the Egyptian, Nawal El Saadawi and the Algerian, Assia Djebar? These two global figures of women's writing and feminist intellectual labor have written nothing that could have made the cut and rescued an entire continent? You will notice that I have refrained from mentioning any of the numerous important feminist thinkers based in Africa. I do not want to bore you. It is also better to cite those whose alterity in US academe one would have believed you couldn't conceivably have missed.

I read sadly in your preface that "our own conversations about the construction of this book has been enhanced by many colleagues and friends who have shared syllabi with us, discussed their teaching practices, and made suggestions about possible inclusions". A long list of names follows and this is where the sadness lies: that not once in all these conversations with this expansive cast of consultants did my story and the story of Africa's contribution to feminist theorizing crop up. Not one person, not one colleague across the feminist studies landscape in the US pointed out this ominous oversight – if indeed it was an oversight – to you? Obioma Nnaemeka is Susan Gubar's neighbor in Indiana for Christ's sake!

There is some good news though. There won't be a shortage of happy African intellectuals who will query the wisdom of even expecting Africa to have been included in your work in the first place. Why do we always whine and complain when Westerners ignore us, they will say?

It is not their responsibility to include us. We should include ourselves by creating our own structures, period! After all, Oyeronke Oyewumi, as if anticipating what would happen with your Norton project, had edited African Gender Studies: A Reader in 2005. Such opinions would of course ignore the simple fact that your work has a universalizing underpinning in terms of its historical breadth and its thematic scope and Africa has been excluded from this picture. They would ignore the fact that this is Norton and who says Norton says canons! They would ignore the fact that even if we were to adopt the reductionist approach that all you have done here is to reflect the multiple voices that have inflected feminist, gender, and women studies in the American academy over the years, the end product conveys the fallacious message that no African woman has been part of this process.

I know you are already wondering how an African woman, who died so many years ago with no evidence of having attended any University, happens to be so familiar with academic language and procedure. You should know the answer to that: I'm now an ancestor, a spirit. I'm not human. I'm supposed to know everything. That is what sanctions my intervention in the affairs of you mortals!

Peace and love, Sarah Baartman

**Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader (Paperback)
by Sandra M. Gilbert (Author), Susan Gubar (Editor)

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures ( at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post ( www.projectponal.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org