Oil!

Reading the articles from National Geographic and Slate and talking today in class about the scramble for this particular African resource made me think of Oil! by Upton Sinclair and that recent, really boring yet award-winning movie (that I've forgotten the name of) that was based on the book. The plots in these take place in California or Texas (I think the book and the movie differ a lot... surprise.), and obviously do not have the same large-scale effects as the events in Africa. It's interesting, to me, at least, that the discovery of oil can connect different people and different parts of the world, whether through trade or just the common effects on the surroundings, social and ecological.

Something that stood out to me in the article from Slate is the settlement town, Atan, across the street from the Kome drilling base for ExxonMobile. It seems to me that the presence of the impoverished, dirty town of Africans hopeful for a job in their own country directly next to the big, shiny, base of foreigners is an example of what all of Africa has become. A report on oil drilling fields in Chad and Cameroon even mentions Atan, but only to reassure that the population has not increased.

A blog titled "Only in Africa" brings up a lot of good points, and references John Ghazvinian's Untapped. It's worth a look if you have a few minutes.

This map also makes me think of what was mentioned in class a few times, about all roads leading to the coast instead of internal African cities. Instead the oil pipe going north or east to cities who could refine it an use it, guess where it goes? Southwest, to the coast.

War In Sierra Leone/Africa

On April 27, 1961, Sierra Leone gained its independence from Britain. Between then and October 1990, a one-party Constitution was in place and there were many military coups, some successful and some not, to overthrow the government. In October 1990, a multi-party system was approved by Parliament and subsequent events began to occur that we saw in Ancestor Stones.

"A military intelligence source who has extensive experience in West Africa described the regional warriors as follows: 'These guys form part of a regional militia I call the insurgent diaspora. They float in and out of wars and operate as they wish. They have no one to tell them where, when and how to behave. They’re been incorporated into militias and armies all over the place – Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire – and are really the most dangerous tool that any government or rebel army can have.' "

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was created with help from Liberia, a neighboring country involved in its own civil war. The main reasons war finally erupted was because of government corruption and the corruption in the diamond business; yet, the leaders of the Liberian forces who aided the RUF were paid in diamonds. At first the RUF was popular in Sierra Leone, as the people thought these rebels would stop the government corruption, however, due to the atrocities we saw in Ancestor Stones and Blood Diamond, the RUF quickly became hated and feared. From 1991 to 2002, the RUF continued to fight for control. After the RUF gained control of the diamond mines, it focused on protecting this economic resource and while the economy of Sierra Leone fell apart, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, another group of rebel soldiers, allied itself with the RUF to protect the economic and political power gained from the diamond trade. The RUF was finally defeated as a military force by an invasion led by Nigerian troops that reinstated Sierra Leone's president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.

After RUF troops were evicted from the capital, it became a political party for the 2002 elections. It won 2.2% of the popular vote and no Parliamentary seats. The party then merged with the All Peoples Congress, which is one of the two major politcal parties in Sierra Leone (the other is the Sierra Leone People's Party).

Ancestor Stones

For the most part, I really enjoyed Ancestor Stones. This is a book I can actually imagine myself reading outside of class, something I could enjoy while sitting on my couch with some hot chocolate instead of my desk with a pen and notebook handy.

One quote that really jumped out to me and almost seemed to sum up each woman's journey was in Abie's section at the very end:

"I was no longer a stranger. I knew just where into all of this I fitted. Because in this small world [the village], everybody had a place, meaning they all knew how they came to be here. A story of which every detail was cherished. And I had mine."

In my previous entry, I wondered if I would every see a happily-ever-after in any of the stories, because each woman had a dud for a husband, or left her husband, or had too many husbands, or did something or had something happen that caused her to be unhappy. But I think the above quote could be applied anywhere in the novel: literally in the village, which is what Abie was talking about in context; but also where each woman eventually found the end of her story, and in the family structure of this book, that is, the three or four generations that this novel chronicles.

My intent for this blog was to write about the dynamics of the women in the village, but when I went to trusty Google to find "Rofathane," I couldn't find anything about this village. I did, however, find an article from Aminatta Forna's website about Rogbonko, the village her grandfather founded and where he planted coffee foundations and grew rice - sound familiar? It is how Asana's story starts, with her father planting coffee beans in their "oasis in the forest," named Rofathane.

So, since I discovered Rofathane is apparantly based on Rogbonko, I took a look at the pictures on Forna's page about Rogbonko, which are definitely worth a look because it makes the stories in Ancestor Stones a little more real, to know that the village of Rofathane and the people who lived there are based in fact.

So, to wrap up my tangent and back to African women and Ancestor Stones: ultimately, it is important to remember that Rofathane and the women in Abie's family have their own niches and their own history that we may think we might not understand, but with the help of books like Ancestor Stones, we can.

I am really enjoying reading Ancestor Stones. While it is a bit difficult to keep track of the characters and how they are related to each other, reading this book is not boring because it is like reading several smaller stories, one after another.

The differing roles the women play is an interesting element of this book to me. Asani's mother, one of the first women we hear about, is respected in her family and her husband's favorite; Hawa's mother was so important that the other women do not dare start their fishing without her. Other women throughout the stories are respected by their husbands, loftily ignore lesser wives, and have varying degrees of responsibilities and titles.

On the other hand, we also see women who are not respected. In Mariama's story, she says "a woman has no religion... she changes her faith to marry and worship to please her husband... Mother would not yeild. And to this day nobody has ever come to me and said she was noble and righteous to do so." We also see stories of women being divorced and left by their husbands.

The many stories of polygamy in Ancestor Stones all relate in some way to either Things Fall Apart or Xala, or even both. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo's wives lived with him and cared for each other's children and affairs as if they were their own, which really, they were because they were in the same family. In Xala, El Hadji's wives and children are their own seperate units, and clash whenever they are forced to come in contact with the other wives or children. El Hadji's wives are jealous of one another and his children do not see him as a personal father figure, but rather as a source for money and have a distant relationship.

Honestly, I expected the women's rights in Ancestor Stones to improve as the timeline progressed; but it looks like I am turning out to be very wrong. Hawa's story in 1965, decades after stories of the women who were so respected and loved amongst the other wives and their husbands, is possibly the most depressing so far. After she married and then left her first husband, she marries a man much younger than her. Because her tubes were tied by a paternalistic doctor (also, my health care ethics class would rip this doctor's act to pieces) and Hawa had to find another wife for her husband so he could have children, they both leave her.

I expected the women to become progressively more independent and respected. I suppose they have become more independent, in a way, because there are more instances of divorce and betrayal. I am nearly finished with Ancestor Stones, and I wonder if, before the end, I will see a happily-ever-after marriage.

Xala

"Wolof is THE language of Senegal, and one of six national languages in Senegal given official recognition by the Government (together with Jola, Manding, Pulaar, Sereer and Soninke). Close to 90% of the population of 9 million of Senegal understand Wolof, whereas only 20% of men and 2% of women currently speak French, even though Senegal is officially a Francophone country."

While reading Xala, one topic presented in the novel stood out to me because of my interest in language. The conflict between Wolof and French was interesting to me because it is one of the first times we have read about the difficulties of language in a novel and not just in the articles.

I got this book from the library and while pulling it from the shelf, I saw many other copies of this novel, but published in French, which is it's original language. Even after seeing this and seeing the "translated from the French by..." on the cover page, I forgot that this book was not originally written in English and it caught me by surprise the first few times I saw the difference in languages noted in the story. For example, when El Hadji picks up his two wives for his wedding, when he goes to Oumi N'Doye's house, the text says "..she said in French." I had to stop and think for a moment, "well... what have they been speaking, then?" Obviously Wolof. There are also several other instances that are marked in the text that tell that the characters have been speaking in Wolof instead of French. Another example where language creates a conflict is when N'Gone, the third wife, speaks in French and Yay Bineta, the Bayden, responds, "brindling, 'I don't understand that jargon.' "

Because of the conflicts the French and Wolof usages create, I am curious as to what else the French left behind. Oumi N'Doye brags about having meat imported from France because "native butchers just don't know how to cut," and we discussed in class the French styles Oumi N'Doye loves and the episode between Rama and the policeman. Apparantly Senegal's currency was created to be linked rate to the French franc; and the Senegal government only owns 41% of the company that regulates transmission of energy in it's own country, while Canada and France own 34%.

The always-informative Wikipedia has a lot of interesting facts about Wolof, and one thing that is extremely interesting to me is that Wolof apparantly does not have any verb tenses; rather, verbs are unchangeable and pronouns denote different times, but there is only one pronoun for all articles, not different ones for masculine or feminine nouns. In case you can't tell, I am very interested in the French language and very glad to know enough of it to converse with someone (as long as it's a pretty simple subject... don't ask me any questions about physics), and it looks like Wolof differs from French so much. French verbs have so many different uses for their verbs - in my dictionary of French verb conjugations, each verb has it's own page and their are fifteen different forms that a verb can be conjugated in. Also, it is very important to know whether a noun in French is masculine or feminine because prepositions can be combined with articles.

If I had more free time (...or any... at all... ever.), this is one book that would be very interesting to try to read in French, because I feel like this is one book especially where nuances of the language would not translate very well. And that's assuming I would even be able to pick up on things like that... but truthfully, I probably wouldn't.

Lumumba : Prime Minister of Congo

Patrice Emery Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo after he helped Congo win it's independence from Belgium in June of 1960. Less than ten weeks later, he was overthrown, captured, and murdered. There were two key events that led to the coup against him: The first was a few days after taking office, he raised the salaries of all government employees except the military, which resulted in riots and rebellion by the military. The second was the independence of the province of Katanga, which Lumumba tried to subdue with Soviet and U.N. troops.


Despite protection provided by U.N. troops, a coup was staged, planned by a military colonel, Joseph Mobutu, and the C.I.A. (it is possible that orders came from President Eisenhower). He was captured, and even though the Soviets tried to pass resolutions in the U.N. to save him, Lumumba was ultimately shot, along with two comrades from the government, by a firing squad (Wikipedia).







This video is almost ten minutes long, but it has more detailed information than I would ever be able to find, and clips from speeches:








The first half of this short newsreel is about Lumumba's capture and unknown status, between the time he was captured and killed:








And his famous "tears, fire, and blood" speech - the first couple minutes are in French and just an introduction, and then the speech is read by another person. If you don't want to listen to it, the words of the speech are in the "info" section of the video.









And an interesting comment underneath a video:


"Il devrait avoir une rue/boulevard/avenue 'LUMUMBA' dans chaque ville de France."
("There should be a street named 'LUMUMBA' in each city in France.")

An Image of Africa

I rather liked this essay by Chinua Achebe - it tried to explain Heart of Darkness, and it picked on Conrad a little. When I read Heart of Darkness, I couldn't explain any of it and all I wanted to do was pick on Conrad.

In paragraph 37, Achebe explains "The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist." Thank you, Mr. Achebe. I still do not understand how this book apparantly awoke the conscious of the West and alerted them to the "rape of the Congo" when the author/narrator/second narrator/whoever is telling the story, who knows, tells the story with the Africans in a demeaning fashion.

While the overall flow of Heart of Darkness will bother me if I ever read this book again (don't count on it), I am very appreciative of the way Achebe explained several things, in particular the idea of Africa being an antithesis of Europe. In paragraph 14, he sums up the meaning of Heart of Darkness with a quote from the book: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours... Ugly." It is the fact that humanity, though seperated by rivers, continents, man-made buildings or forests, is all still humanity in the end, that all the "inhuman" things another culture does is something any other culture is capable of because we are all humans.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us." - Kenya newspaper article

::edit:: I apologize if there are any layout problems when viewing my entry... I am not a fan of blogspot.