Loomnie

In The New York Review of Books:

Many years ago, the Belgian anthropologist Johannes Fabian identified a tendency he called “the denial of coevalness.” “The history of our discipline,” he wrote, reveals the use of time for “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.” But this isn’t just a professional deformation of anthropologists: presented with an African—and especially a rural African—setting, many in the West instinctively turn to thoughts of the ancient human past. Firstbrook is no exception here. He begins a timeline that appears toward the end of his book with this item:

2.4 million BC…. A manlike ape or hominid called Australopithecus africanus lives in East Africa

Is it fussy to observe that the Obamas have no special claim on A. africanus just because they happen to live on the continent where the species disappeared two million years ago? Although the book blessedly avoids extensive discussion of prehistory, it does insist on recounting—on the basis of academic historical and anthropological accounts—the migrations of the Nilotic ancestors of the modern Luo people. Firstbrook flies north from Kenya to Juba, in southern Sudan, in order to visit the vast swamp north of the Imatong Mountains called the Sudd. “Historians and anthropologists,” he tells us solemnly, “believe the southern part of the Sudd to be the ‘cradleland’ of Barack Obama’s ancestors.” As it turns out, though, they left in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Imagine a book about Bill Clinton’s family that began with the migration of the Franks—apparently Clinton has Frankish ancestry—in the fourth century: “Historians believe the middle and lower Rhine valley to be the ‘cradleland’ of William Jefferson Clinton’s ancestors.”

Fortunately by the third chapter, we are in real family history, following the life of Opiyo, the President’s great-great-grandfather, who was born in the early 1830s in Kendu Bay, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Because Firstbrook was able to recover few specific details about him, he uses this chapter to introduce Luo traditions of birth, marriage, the building of family compounds, funerals, and so on. Opiyo is a name for a firstborn twin, and given that the Luo consider twins “a bad omen,” his life would have begun with the careful carrying out of rituals to keep away harm. Despite this, he “grew to be a strong and respected leader among the Luo of south Nyanza.”

Firstbrook calls this man Opiyo Obama in the chapter’s heading…which would probably have come as news to Opiyo. According to the Luo naming system, he should have been known by the combination of his own personal name and that of his father, which was Obong’o. In fact, the President inherited the name Obama because it was the personal name of Opiyo’s son. When the President’s grandfather took the name Onyango Obama, he was simply following Luo tradition. “Onyango” was his personal name, “Obama” was his father’s. It wasn’t the name of a family.

The breach of naming traditions came in the generation that followed, when Onyango’s son Barack took the name Obama. In the colonial period, the father’s second name came to be treated like an English surname. The idea of an Obama family, defined by a shared family name passing from father to son, is a colonial innovation. Of course, the President’s patrilineal kin thought of themselves as a family. That’s why they had all this genealogical information. But they wouldn’t have thought they were linked by a name.

Lest you think everything is as scathing, read the whole thing here.

1. We learn that Nigerians are the happiest people in the world. Again.

2. Is Estonia boarding a sinking Titanic?

3. HSBC releases a report titled The World in 2050

4. Obama in Africa: To go or not to go?

5. “The scooter traffic [in Vietnam] more or less lives up to reputation.”

6. “In the past few centuries, what was once the European and then American periphery became the core of the world economy. Now, the economies that became the periphery are re-emerging as the core” – Martin Wolf.

1. Akin pulls out tissues for President Yar’Adua

2. Goodluck Jonathan makes his first address as president to the country (Video)

3. Reuters says Yar’Adua death leaves succession wide open

4. Next gives details of the burial

5. Discussions and speculations about who will become the new vice president

6. Is it ever too early for 419ers to start trying to use the president’s death in scam emails?

The dust will settle soon. I reserve any major commentary until then.

My column of this week.

December 25, 2009: A Nigerian-born male, with secondary education in Togo and university education in London, said to have been radicalized during his university days in London, and to have been further radicalized in Yemen, attempted to detonate an ‘incendiary device’ that he had sown into his underwear before getting on a flight to Detroit. The situation was contained with the help of fellow passengers.

The flight originated from Amsterdam Schiphol airport, where the airport security failed to detect the said ‘incendiary device’.

The first reaction of the American Transportation Security Administration was to immediately announce a one-hour rule. This means, among other things, that nobody on a flight bound for the United States is allowed to leave their seat during the last hour of the flight, not even to go to the toilet.

Reacting to this, some commentators complained about how it seems that the US is playing catch-up with terrorists. They wondered whether terrorists would actually repeat their last failed tactic.

Shortly after the news of the Detroit terror attempt, there were debates in the media about whether or not a full-body scanner would have detected that there was some foreign article in the underwear, and if so, whether it would not be better to have full-body scanners in all airports. One should point out that now would be a good time to invest in the shares of companies that manufacture said scanners.

January 3, 2010: The American Transportation Security Administration declared Nigeria ‘a country of special interest’ and added it to a list of countries whose citizens would have to go through ‘enhanced screening’.

Commentators wondered whether it was really wise to alienate potential allies in the fight against extremist Islam, pointing out that Nigerians had done all they could to stop the situation, and that ultimately, it was American officials who dropped the proverbial ball.

Other commentators wondered at the generalization about a country from one isolated case, especially since there was nothing in the young man’s past to suggest that he had been radicalized, or had radicalized others, in Nigeria.

In reply to these, other commentators stressed the fact that Nigeria could be a hotbed of terrorism, especially because there have been what have been largely termed religious violence in the Northern part of the country. In counter-reaction, some pointed out that this is an overtly simplistic take on violent conflicts that are a lot more political than religious.

January 6, 2010: The Nigerian Senate gave the United States a seven-day ultimatum to remove the name of the country from the list. They threatened the severance of diplomatic with the United States if the United States refuses to remove the name of the country from the list.

On the same day, Mrs. Dora Akunyili, Information Minister and rebrander-in-chief of Nigeria, who had earlier tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to distance Nigeria from the young man with poor taste in underwear, said that the inclusion of Nigeria on the list had ‘the potential of undermining long-standing and established US-Nigeria bilateral ties and the goodwill the US enjoys in Nigeria’.

January 7, 2010: Barack Obama, the American President said, at a press conference, ‘we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.’

Some commentators said that this was in reaction to those who said that United States was now suffering from a ‘siege mentality’ by introducing measures that some see as becoming, on the one hand, increasingly invasive of individual privacy, and on the other, increasingly isolationist.

Glaringly absent was any mention of the threat by the African superpower.

January 8, 2010: Mr. Michael Aondoakaa, Attorney-General and Minister of Justice of Nigeria, speaking on behalf of a president whose state of mind and health remain largely unknown, allayed fears of any confrontation. He said, ‘we cannot be talking about ultimatum at this stage.’ He also said that the two countries would avoid a potential face-off by resorting to diplomatic solutions to the issue.

To which Petrodollar-land heaved a sigh of relief.

President Obama granted his very first one-on-one interview as a president to a media house that broadcasts out of Dubai. The White House Blog titles the post that announces the interview ‘President to Muslim World: “Americans are not your enemy”‘, which clearly shows that the interview was meant as an interview, or an address, if you will, to the Muslim world. The interview has him talking about having Muslim relatives, and about having lived in Muslim countries. The Economists Democracy in America blog thinks it was a good move for the president to have granted his first interview to a foreign media house, because an American media outfit would have probably asked Rob Blagojevich-related questions. That is true, but I also think that the interview is part of his defense and foreign policies. He did the symbolic thing of making sure that his first call as a president was made to Mahmoud Abass; that, I think, was an apology of sorts for having kept quiet during the recent Gaza bombings. Now, he has made his first interview one in which he talks directly to the Muslim world, and one in which he makes them understand that he does not see them as the enemy.

Responses
Responses to the interview have varied widely, from ‘I am so proud to be American’ to ‘Bush protected Israel, Obama is going to destroy her’. (You can check the Al Arabiya website for some of the comments.) My impression is that this is a really smart man, who understands that so much is tied to a peaceful relationship with the Muslim world. I think this interview is a great blow to Al Qaeda, and that it makes a case for extremist Islam a lot harder to sell. But, in case anybody thinks this is a sign of weakness, just remember that this same man who is saying that America is not the enemy of the Muslim world commands the best-equipped Army in the world.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Our New Face To The World
• Obama to Muslims: We Are Not the Enemy
• In Interview, Obama Reaches Out to Muslim World
• Barack Obama tells Muslims ‘Americans are not your enemy’
• Obama Reaches Out To Muslims

I was in Chicago last week for the African Studies Association Meeting at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Walking around on a windy night in downtown Chicago, looking up at the tall buildings in the foggy night, I had the feeling that I was on a movie set. I remembered reading somewhere that Gotham City was modeled after Chicago. A young lady said, some days later, that she saw the Batmobile during the shooting of The Dark Knight.

If you are ever in Chicago, a good place to visit is the Field Museum. It is great, and you might see your first dinosaur. The Art Institute museum is also a must see. The parks are also really, really great. Ok, I might have been infected just a little bit by the American propensity for the superlative.

And just in case you are wondering, I didn’t see Obama, but in a T-Shirts store, I met a manager who was grumpy about how much business they have had in the past few months. He said he had never seen anything like it before. Shirts with different messages about Mr Obama, the Democratic Party and the GOP were on sale. It was not difficult to figure out that Chicago was really very Democratic. And oh, there is now an Obama city tour, a bus ride that would take you around on a tour of the president-elect’s favourite Chicago spots. I wasn’t on that either.

Some pictures.

From my hotel room

Downtown Chicago

Michigan Avenue

Nice legs close to the field museum

Chicago Tribune

Paul Krugman thinks that Mr Obama has the chance of ushering in a FDR-like New Deal for the United States, but he thinks that Obama should be less cautious about his economic policies. He says that the shortcomings of FDRs New Deal, on the short run, was due to the cautiousness of the economic policies he introduced.

…Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.

In another paragraph:

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

The whole article, at Paul Krugman’s column, is here.

This did not really come as a surprise now, did it? The polls said it, the pundits called it, and the outpouring of passion underlined it. Despite talks of the Bradley effect people kept believing that the change that Mr Obama promised – and indeed epitomised – would be realised. Now that it really is, we are relieved. Relieved mainly that the hope is realised.

In Europe
In Europe, Mr Obama has been close to the heart of the people. Last night, I learnt of an association of Obama supporters in my small eastern German city of Halle. I went to join them late in the evening to watch the early results on CNN. There seems to be a promise to be an improvement in relations across the Atlantic.

I am happy for Barack Obama, and I am happy for America. This is probably the greatest thing that has happened to America in recent history.

by Alfred Ochuma
www.chekwas.wordpress.com

The emergence of Barack obama as the first black presidential nominee of a major party in the U.S is no longer news – the news obviously is that the United States of America has once again re-assured the World that they are the world’s leading democracy. In the face of seeming racial inequality and perceived segregation, they willingly and enthusiastically, and with great aspiration and anticipation of a greater future, voted today the most intelligent, vibrant and dependable leader I have heard of in recent times.

The Senator from Illinois and the President-elect is a man who has proven bookmakers wrong in many occasions, a pacesetter of great repute, a campaigner for change, and above all an honest gentleman who needs no introduction.

Obama’s victory in today’s election should not be seen as a political victory for the U.S Democratic party alone, but a victory for the down-trodden, the neglected, the discriminated-against, the colored people of the world and above all, a victory for humanity.

The son of a Kenyan immigrant has proven that a man should not be judged by the colour of his skin or background, but by the content of his character. Martin Luther King,Jr. in his famous speech at Lincoln Memorial stated thus: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” Today that dream has become a reality.

Thank you America today for re-establishing your hope in the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr. who foresaw a day like this.

Thank you America for standing on the side of economic recovery, peace, unity and progress.

Thank you America for voting Barack Obama.

In the concluding paragraph of the story:

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

The story is here….