RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NY Times: "A Racist Turn in India"

From the beginning, India is one of my favourites countries and Indians one of my favourite peoples. It's far from being an idle or empty claim.

Some brief thoughts about Hanuman's India, not directly connected to this news item, but Hanuman - who Indian Muslims such as  the late Ahmed Deedat  without fail, have ridiculed in the past as "the monkey god", plays an important role in the Hindu epic The Ramayana– taken as Divine history,  whilst  for others it's merely Hindu  mythology – in any case the foundational claim of Dravidian India  to a piece of Sri Lanka  - since in the course of events in the Ramayana drama,  the scoundrel Ravana (a dark skinned fellow) , kidnaps the Lord Rama's wife Sita and absconds with her to Sri Lanka....

First of all a correction from an earlier posting in which I said that Diana Ross  rode on the Ashram elephant  at Ganeshpuri  in 1979  - the same year that she released " It's my house".  Well, I was in New York in 1979 – so it was in 1977 that Diana Ross paid a curtsey call on Baba Muktanda and rode on the aforementioned elephant.  I hadn't seen Baba for a few weeks, we were told  by the Ashram admin that he was a little indisposed, had something of a cold, but when Her Highness Lady Diana Ross turned up,  in no time at all she was being treated like a piece of American Royalty from the White house,  after all at that time her boyfriend was an Aryan-looking  gringo by the name of  Werner Erhard  - one of  the main sponsors  of  Baba's second American tour, so why shouldn't she be treated like a high grade/  international high caste VIP, soon enough sipping tea with the suddenly well-again satguru  in the privacy of what I imagined was Baba's own personal holy of holies. I say "imagined" because in my nine months with Baba I never once entered his personal quarters, either at Ganeshpuri or in New York in 1976 and 1979, so I can still only imagine the kind of Beluchi carpets that must have graced his inner sanctuary.

At this point I must inform you that Baba visited me in Nigeria, in 1981 -a mystical night visit and the following day my neighbour Mr. Prasad from Hyderabad (a lecturer in physics) asked me if I was aware that according to the Times of India, Baba had taken MahaSamadi (had passed away) this time had left his body – ah, and it was there and then that I realised the significance of the night visitation , but I wasn't prepared to take Mr. Prasad's word for it , since  during that my first rainy season in Nigeria he had confided in me that the choirs of croaking frogs reminded him of the Brahmin priests chanting their  holy mantras . But then I read the news item myself, and it was there in black and white: Baba had become one with the universe!

With reference to what is reported about Nigerians missing home and trying to adjust to life in India, again, briefly, rule number one ought to be "When in Rome, do as the Romans" - I don't know exactly how Nigerians & Ugandans fit into the highly structured Indian Society, but find their place they must. I guess it could begin by finding the self.....

 Nilanjana S. Roy tells us that "Indians have been settling on that continent since at least the 15th century" and that is as far as she goes.

 We all know about the significance of the father of Modern India, Mahatma Gandhi's period in South Africa

Indeed Indians settled in many places in Africa.

An English-Indian couple - both Oxford graduates, Mr. & Mrs. Holden taught English at the secondary school I attended in Sierra Leone ( they did not teach any of the classes I was in )  - up till today Indians are having a much better time in Sierra Leone, than they had in Idi Amin's Uganda. The latest I hear is that Indians in Sierra Leone run the best hospitals in that country....

What we do know is that Idi Amin Dada was quite vicious to the Indian community in Uganda– we know a lot about that, and over the years I've met quite a few Indians in the UK, who are part of the Indian Community which Field- Marshall Amin deported from his kingdom.  I've told a few of them that at least it was more merciful than feeding them to his crocodiles.

 India has of course changed a lot since the cynical V. S. Naipual – the man this forum loves to hate, wrote the following about his ancestral home turf:

 An Area of Darkness (1964)

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)

One of these days I'm going to post an insightful essay entitled "The Naipaul in us" in which I take a good look at us - including those of us who say that once upon a time all the intellectuals of Sierra Leone supported a one-party state in that country, thus implying that some educated fools are better than some other educated fools, educated footballers, educated pastors and that at least it's not every Professor Winterbottom that is qualified to lead. But  it's statements like " Though Kofi Busia was more formally educated than Kwame Nkrumah, the later accomplished more in three years for Ghana than the former did in a comparable phase"– Which comparable phase?

Kofi Busia was Prime Minister of the 2nd Republic of Ghana, between 1 October 1969 – and 13 January 1972. I was in Ghana between January and 1970 and September 1971 and as a follower of Ghanaian politics during that period the only mistake that KB made was when he "challenged" the judiciary...

 But let me reminisce a little - inspired by some of what Kwabena Akurang- Parry has said and here I'm reminiscing a little about the Kofi Busia times

My Better Half and I  were graduate students and lived at the chalets in South Legon , about a mile from the Institute of African Studies which was located right at the  main entrance to the University of Ghana, Legon   - opposite the village of Medina  - and before I purchased a 250 cc Honda motorcycle from Rudy Silas ( African- American & wife Thelma) my Better Half and I would often wait at the road  a few meters from the Chalets  - wait and wait  hoping to thumb a ride , wait and watch many a car  zooming past without stopping, making me feel  like Robert Johnson , so I told Better Half, I think I'll hide in the bush – and it worked – first time pot-bellied senior service Ghanaian wabenzi spied with his little eye a tall, long haired blonde female standing alone and trying to get a lift to the main campus he jumped on his brakes so hard, the car almost overturned, he opens the front door  to let her in , sees me  coming out of the bush and reaching for the handle to the rear door of his car -  who are you he asks me – I'm Cornelius I tell him and climb in.  Where do you come from,  he asks my Better Half and when she says, "Sweden" he starts getting excited, wnats to know what she could be doing that evening – maybe he could  show her around town...

But as Kwabena Akurang- Parry says, things have changed – change has come to Ghana....

A rumination on the situation of Africans in India to be continued, shortly...

And please don't forget: Krishna is not white, Krishna's blue

Sincerely,

We Sweden

In this day and age Africans are still hit with the deadly end of the rod wherever they go and found themselves even in their own countries by foreigners. In Ghana we worship Indians, Lebanese, Syrians, Chinese, and above all whites, our "Me Buroni." If there is a job opportunity, a Ghanaian is more likely to tiptoe, look above the heads of fellow Ghanaians, and call on distant-placed light-complexioned foreigners for the job or the contract, even in building a tomb for the late President John Atta Mills. On a bus, a Ghanaian is more likely to give up his/her seat to Chinese, Lebanese, Syrians, Indians, etc. Hmm! A white person would be given the passenger seat beside the driver - we call it "front seat" or "first class!" As a graduate student of the Institute of African Studies (IAS), University of Ghana, Legon, whenever we queued for "trotro' or public transport, then behind the precincts of of the IAS, and there were white foreign students among us, we gave our positions in the queue to them. When I arrived in Canada to continue with my graduate studies at the MA level, I had several opportunities to reminisce about the differences between how foreign students in Ghana were privileged as well as integrated into the fabric of campus life by all and sundry and my dire circumstances like a leper at an Akan Odwira festival! Thus there are lived experiences overseas that conscientize us: if I were to join the queues of yesteryears, I would certainly not give up my slot in the line to any foreign student. And even teaching positions in our higher institutions are easily colonized by foreigners who own light-skin. Why oh why? Africans don suffer suffer at home and we don suffer abroad. Caveat: absolutely, these are generalities that may not speak to other people's experiences!   These and others are fictionally documented in my forthcoming "immigrant fiction" entitled "Velvet Seekers: Enslaving Africans in these Parts."

 

Kwabena 

---

From:usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2014 9:14 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NY Times: "A Racist Turn in India"

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

By NILANJANA S. ROY
Jan 24,  2014

NEW DELHI — The Africans — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Ugandans — began leaving my neighborhood in New Delhi around December. Each week, more and more families exited. Some went to parts of Delhi considered more accepting of Africans; others to areas where the residents were thought to be less interfering in general. I have heard that some of the Ghanaian families had gone back to Africa, but I don't know that for sure.

For years, they had been a part of the swirl of cultures, languages and races that makes up this part of the capital. The Nigerian women in their bright dresses out for evening strolls and the Cameroonian family with the curious-eyed baby at the ice-cream van had made a life for themselves alongside the Afghans, Tamils and Iranians.

On Oct. 31, about a month before the departures started, a Nigerian national, rumored to have been in the drug trade, was found dead in Goa. Nigerians in the coastal state protested his murder as an act of racism, while posters read: "We want peace in Goa. Say no to Nigerians. Say no to drugs." One state minister threatened to throw out Nigerians living illegally. Another equated them with a cancer. He later apologized, adding that he hadn't imagined there would be a "problem" with his statement.

read balance: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/roy-the-wrong-kind-of-foreigner.html?ref=international

--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839  har...@msu.edu

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.