A seminal paper of the time, and we're really delighted to have Professor and Yamanto with us from and from UC T from the University of Cape Town.
He's going to be talking about about Chinua Achebe, so.
So first of all, like if I could ask everyone, please,
to turn off your cameras and to make sure that your caps that you keep yourselves muted and otherwise it gets problematic with a school of this size.
And that would be wonderful. Thank you. We're going to have our paper and then we'll have then we'll have questions afterwards.
So do you feel feel free to to either raise your hand when it comes to the to the
questions asked of the seminar using the using the hand function of my teams?
Okay, think or feel free to to appear on your camera and give me a wave and we can do it that way.
So my name is Peter Brook.
I'm a developmental lecturer here at Oxford in African history, and I lecture at the African Studies Centre and also at the history faculty.
So, so today we're hosting Professor Newman Joe.
He's professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
He's taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities not only in South Africa, but also in Cameroon and in Botswana.
And he's researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana amongst the lengthy publications list.
Perhaps his most well-known book is his 2005 monograph Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging,
which is a kind of handbook for anyone who works on social media in Africa, both historically and in the present.
He's also written about a number of other subjects, including cannibalism,
and recently in 2018 he was awarded The Fate and All of the Prise for Best Monograph by the African Studies
Association of the UK for his book hashtag RhodesMustFall Nibbling at Brazilian Colonialism in South Africa.
It may possibly be that we choose to talk briefly, at least about Cecil Rhodes appropriately for an Oxford seminar in our questions.
And anyway, it's a great delight to to to welcome Professor Newman to,
and I'll hand over now for a paper on being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress.
Inspiration from Chinua Achebe is Proverbs. Thank you very much, Peter and Transport persuading me to be part of this important seminar series.
It's an honour I always at any given time, if I can, one to be associated with Oxford.
I have lots of friends there, and I'm happy to see some of them in attendance.
I. I have pre circulated a paper, at least the highlight of the paper to through Peter, and I hope that you would read them,
read it eventually to get the substance of what I would like to to to highlight in what I really
want to make this seminar about a conversation on some of the issues I think are important,
especially at this moment, and it's a moment when we are asking questions.
In the past week, I attended a two seminar conferences,
one organised by the University of Westminster and the other by source on decolonisation and collaboration in research,
knowledge, knowledge production and so on.
So these are topical issues, and I have a I have decided to talk on a Achebe because I think he has a thing or two to contribute to this conversation.
And the first is a and that's a reason why I suggested this topic.
I may as well have given a topic on roads and monuments and statues and all the like, but I thought this is important,
which is being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress and how I Quebecers use use of Proverbs inspires
us to to to appreciate African identities as dynamic as in a constantly enriching themselves in various ways.
And the one thing that one immediately get from a champions embrace of Igbo value systems or ideas of the world
and representations of the world is a the the say and practises around the idea that no condition is permanent.
When when you speak with Igbo persons that you meet anywhere after two or three phrases,
you are most likely to hear something that really amounts to no condition is permanent.
And if you have the opportunity of visiting Igbo land and parts of Igbo, as I have had the opportunity to do because of my friends in the Cameroon,
the Cameroon and northwest and southwest Cameroon area, you'll become very familiar with this sense of dynamism that they take dearly.
And in in a chip is, uh, works this aspect of incompleteness.
And and dynamism is constant.
If no condition is permanent, it suggests that nothing is complete.
Nothing can rest on its laurels. Nothing is ever as such that you can say it has attained to the pinnacle of perfection,
and you can then rest assured that it wouldn't change any more.
So change is a constant and a chip dump demonstrated is superbly well in in his borrowings and adaptation of the able problems.
And if you see even the idea of change, the proverb is not immune to.
The problem, and it is such that a can be used to his use in an indirect way and can be appropriated by different users in the same conversation,
in fascinating ways. So add to to make different points in.
And I think that aspect of incompleteness, I would suggest,
is very important for us to take on board as we are looking for a white template of knowledge production
representing an African epistemology is informed by African ontologies and so on and so forth,
and how we can get it right in terms of knowledge production.
I would suggest we take seriously this idea of incompleteness, which comes through repeatedly in a chambers,
worked and I would suggest in many other works if I were given this talk on a much to Twala,
it will be exactly the same and incompleteness at the core.
But incompleteness, I would hesitant to say not as something we should be sure we should be or should be apologetic about,
not as something that suggests that you fall short.
Instead, it is a universal. It is a disposition that equips you to be able to reach out and enhance yourself through various
forms of self activation through various forms of motion and mobility and interaction with others.
So with the idea of incompleteness comes the idea of mobility.
And again, when you listen and read Achebe, whether he's novels or his essays,
this issue of mobility is played and replayed and replayed very effectively to demonstrate that.
Without mobility, we will be lost and debt completely in our incompleteness.
We will be frozen to the point of being eliminated, being completely incapable of lying.
So comes to mobility. We are able to almost like, defrost or activate our incompleteness to be able to achieve,
to be able to reach our day and fulfil ourselves to the extent possible.
And that fulfilment due to the Ebo from which Achebe draws his wisdom already have
a lot of lots of proverbs to the effect that that no condition is permanent.
It also pre-empts and warns us against mistaking in our temporarily self fulfilment as the attainment of completeness.
So even as he, he and world he draws on,
pushes us to be mobile in order to enhance ourselves that the disabuse us almost
immediately of any ambitions of permanence and in our in our sense of completeness.
So basically, the tell all you are free to rise and excel to fulfil yourself,
but do not delude yourself that the moment of of of enhancement that you have acquired amounts to completeness lest you become violent,
and that by letting orders and the humanities. It is a very interesting lesson,
given that Achebe and the Igbo society he was writing from have a long experience at people
and other communities that use exactly this idea of mobility to come to to fulfil themselves,
but by the deluding themselves that complete ness was possible and that complete death they have acquired at a at a terrible price of endangering.
And did this this dispossessed in others in ways that we are all too familiar with.
So this investment in in recognising that we are incomplete and rising to the point of celebrating our incompleteness and by looking for ways,
creative, innovative ways of mobilising ourselves to fulfil ourselves in various ways through encounters with others,
but always mindful of the fact that we must not get carried away to think that we begin to
dictate to others and in terms of ambitions of conquest or superiority and so on and so on.
There is a very good one.
One of the proverbs that Achebe adopts and adopts from his Igbo community to this effect is the proverb around the dancing masquerade.
And he he likens the world to a mask dancing.
And says that if you really want to observe this mosque to the fullest and to be able to take in that dance,
it would all the complexity and nuances of a nimble footed dancing masquerade.
You really have to keep pace with it. You move with it.
And if you move with it and you are not stubborn and fixated in one spot on one spot,
you will tick in the fullness of that dance and a dancing masquerade and fills it.
Relax. The idea is never to stop, always going and so on and so forth.
So this sense of never sitting at one point where you say I've achieved a pin up at the pinnacle of whatever ambitions I said for myself,
and therefore I can rest, is it considered something that one must not do?
And so you have that sense, which I think can be very useful already.
Just yet, this idea of incompleteness, the idea of mobility and the idea of encounters with others,
because when the masquerade dances, it moved from one place to another.
And that movement does not live it on, on, on, on, on.
It is unaffected by those places, it's been to the site, it sees the world is able to take it all becomes part of it,
be it all get into the mass correct and helps in in reaching all that masquerade is.
And in many ways, you could take a Chinua Achebe as an exemplar of what he writes about this dance in correct,
his life in many ways was like the dancing masquerade disc, taking yourself into various places with your dance.
And at the same time, bringing word that you have encountered through that process that you elaborate back, would you?
Blending it into you and becoming something more than what you started with originally.
So this open ended ness is a very useful way of seeing ambitions,
even as you talk in terms of essences were the essences are not one is not determined by those essences or confined to them.
But there's always opening out to enrich oneself through one's mobility, one's encounters with others and always a sense of humility in that regard.
So while a chip may recognise the importance of encounters and all of the like,
he also equally tried to emphasise the idea of humility and to disabuse us of winner takes all.
If you're not, is his criticism of colonialism and imperialism of all the orders?
It wasn't so much of that in the dance of incompleteness, as you cannot learn from the order to enrich yourselves.
It was more that in that dance you came across people who were so embittered,
so intoxicated would ambitions of dominance that they reduced a dance that would
otherwise have been very productive and mutually enriching to a one dimensional,
conquest driven exploit. And he felt terribly insulted by that sort of thing because he, like many other writers of his generation.
It was almost as if those animated by these ambitions of dominance were determined to ignore the fact that they became who dare were.
Thanks to the relationships that they had with others, for example, relationships of subordination, relationships of disposition,
relationships of infantilized nation and so on and so forth made you tall in in those encounters
and you could leave them would serve delusion that you were self-made and so on and so forth.
So both him and someone like a must to to allow in whom I am equally interested emphasise the idea of the importance of debt and indebtedness.
And you see if if you start your life as an incomplete being like we all are,
the incomplete ness is universal and through your mobility, you and countless others who are equally incomplete but incomplete.
Incompleteness is not uniform and standardise and routinised they enhance your would their incompleteness just as you enhance them?
Would yours? Then you should. Instead of cancelling, are the other acknowledge your debt and indebtedness to one another.
And that acknowledgement means that everyone is a winner and no one is a loser.
It also means that power is not permanently would the person who has a temporary victory.
It makes it much more interesting in being able to to account for the story of the encounter in a way
that captures the various facets I talked about in nuanced complexities of the dance in masquerade.
So this again, is what I should be emphasised, and I would suggest that if you take a very quick look just at his life,
he lived this particular metaphor or this particular proverb of a dance in masquerade first from his infanti years.
He his father was a missionary. One of the well in the old A Post Apostolic Church, where he moved around for almost 34 four years or so,
converting various and preaching the word of God in various parts of Ebola.
And his son was born with an Igbo name, took on the name of Albert,
which was considered to be a very important them to somebody close to royalty at the time.
And he then followed in the same trajectory to go to school and so on and so forth.
And he he he he at the same time drew a lot about what it meant to be Igbo from an uncle of his who was very steeped in traditions.
So this is someone who did not make arbitrary choices of who he was and and a way
to eliminate every other possible influence in his incompleteness and mobility.
He allowed different forces and different encounters to ship him.
And the he acquired and mastered the English language, but he felt that however useful to him,
the English language was he couldn't use it to tell the stories of these IBO world and Ebola experiences without any way seeking to domesticate it,
to take it in and bring it into conversation would be colourful proverb metaphor written by rich Igbo way of speaking and such.
And it wasn't just as if taking English and feeding it with Igbo, even the Igbo.
If you noticed one of the contributors to the book that we we have written on,
Proverbs with this title is a professor at the in abakaliki who has painstakingly documented the lives of a proverb hunter.
A female proverb, hunter, one who felt that these Igbo rich people provide much needed to be harnessed, harvested and preserved for future use.
And one thing that comes across is that what how did the proverb read in in Igbo when you see,
for example, a is a translation into English, it is a very creative work.
It's not just a literal translation and so on.
So in a way, he he gets the Igbo proverb it's important to tell the story.
He adapts it in his English translation,
and he gives us an opportunity for people who do not speak Igbo like myself to have a sense of what this the promise
of this problem and big because proverbs condense words of wisdom that document the experience of a given context.
It is all too easy for us to imagine that they are frozen in their meaning and so on and so forth.
But I, somebody who has fallen in love with nature based proverbs,
can take it and employ it in other ways that to to that brings out new dimensions of it and a new sense of meaning.
Hence, the idea of using a must to buy sorry you didn't achieve is a proverbs to talk about being and becoming
African as a permanent work in progress in one of the papers that I did recently on a decolonising academy.
I use the proverb of the word is like a dancing masquerade.
If you want to see it where you have to keep pace with it by simply substituting with the word, Africa is like a dancing masquerade.
If you want to see it where you have to keep pace with it.
If Africa is in history produced of by encounters mobilities of various kinds into the continent and out of the continent by various Africans,
you cannot do justice to African ness of being by reducing it to a particular geography only or a particular point in history.
You have to keep pace with the dynamism of the continent, with the fact that Africans are both on the continent and out of it.
And the African ness does not expire simply because they have migrated to North Carolina or to Oxford or to wherever you might find them.
So this brings me to another point in that both are cheap and they prove up uses an idea of being and becoming African.
Can, as a result of mobility and encounters with others, leads me to see these things more in terms of composite ness of be that we.
If you ask any individual or any cultural community that was at documenting its sociology,
it's it's it's an everyday messiness of of everyday life to describe themselves.
They would not give you a sense of identity that is neatly packaged and the linear a unified and singular it will always be.
If you had a conversation, you see snippets of various influences that have gone into making them who they are as an open ended composite being.
And this composite ness is exciting to me in coming if we are looking for innovative ways of decolonisation,
of knowledge production that do not simply imply unravelling like this call in a mosque to $2 palm wine drink.
When you unravel, you unravel to the point of the incomplete they discard,
or a type of incompleteness that is is not productive because it's not incomplete, not emotion.
Any incompleteness emotion is incomplete, and that leads to encounters.
Both encounters affect you just as Europe often, and it makes a composite being of you.
So I think that we we should see why these a proverbs are useful for us thinking Africa in such flexible terms.
The idea of composite image is also useful in seeing how the meaning of those proverbs keeps being enrich or what would new encounters,
and that unlike a text that is frozen in meaning.
However, much an author would wish that a proverb is always becoming, as well as those societies that it shaped and seeks to speak for.
And I think with that, I didn't suggest that if we were to draw on a must to $2 a gap, I must accept this idea of of of of.
And you said, I'm flexible, you said of Proverbs. We could end up with an idea of being African and knowledge production in
Africa that is best described as convivial and and conviviality in this case.
And in this particular, you usage must be predicated or on or presupposed by the idea of incompleteness.
So I will stop there and hope that I have put enough on the table for a conversation in the form of comments and questions.
Thank you. Thank you so much. It was the most interesting paper.
Well, people are gathering their thoughts. I'd like to just kick off with a question about chip time in and in broadcasting.
So if I understand correctly, you spent several years at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in the mid 1960s and
you're talking about the dancing masquerade got me thinking about his relationship,
difficult relationship. I think with with the corporation and as a director of external broadcasting,
I wonder whether his involvement with with with with radio and perhaps media more broadly.
State media in particular has has a role in shaping his interest in in Proverbs and perhaps more broadly and in in non literary,
sorry non and non written forms of literature in a radio as literature or oral traditions.
And whether that whether that played a significant role,
do you feel in his informing his feelings about about proverbs and about literature more broadly?
Yeah, I would say so, yes,
because quite a lot of what I've learnt about his use of proverbs and ease have come not not so much from the in the novels themselves,
but from his essays and what he sought to achieve by doing that and the insistence always that, for example,
in the Ebola on where he grew up and the language he mastered, speaking and speaking your mouth as they say everybody had to to have their say.
It was important to articulate yourselves a would addiction or language and would because of.
That better communicated what you had to say.
So speaking in speech was taken very seriously and is an allusion to the fact that a
proverbs the palm oil with which were eaten basically if you go to southeastern Nigeria,
the Igbo area had almost every house has its own palmed palm trees as it were, and palm oil comes in even the poorest of the poor.
I expected to to to to afford palm oil when they cook.
So this idea of where lubricated expression is important and his working in radio would just have enhanced it.
Thank you very much. So we've got a few few questions here, just a reminder that if you have a question, you can you can raise your hand on the.